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EX 




THE HIGHER POWERS 
OF MIND AND SPIRIT 



BY 



RALPH WALDO TRINE 



NEW YORK 

DODGE PUBLISHING COMPANY 

EIGHTH AVENUE 

33d Street 34th Street 



Copyright, 1917 
BY RALPH WAI.DO THINK 



FOREWORD 

We are all dwellers in two kingdoms, 
the inner kingdom, the kingdom of the mind 
and spirit, and the outer kingdom, that of the 
body and the physical universe about us. In 
the former, the kingdom of the unseen, lie 
the silent, subtle forces that are continually 
determining, and with exact precision, the 
conditions of the latter. 

To strike the right balance in life is one of 
the supreme essentials of all successful living. 
We must work, for we must have bread. We 
require other things than bread. They are 
not only valuable, comfortable, but necessary. 
It is a dumb, stolid being, however, who does 
not realize that life consists of more than 
these. They spell mere existence, not abun- 
dance, fullness of life. 

We can become so absorbed in making a 
living that we have no time for Ih-ing. To be 
capable and efficient in one's work is a splendid 
thing; but efficiency can be made a great 
mechanical device that robs life of far more 
than it returns it. A nation can become so 
possessed, and even obsessed, with the idea of 

3 



16S--M54 



4 FOREWORD 

power and grandeur through efficiency and 
organisation, that it becomes a great machine 
and robs its people of the finer fruits of life 
that spring from a wisely subordinated and 
co-ordinated individuality. Here again it is 
the wise balance that determines all. 

Our prevailing thoughts and emotions de- 
termine, and with absolute accuracy, the pre- 
vailing conditions of our outward, material life, 
and likewise the prevailing conditions of our 
bodily life. Would we have any conditions 
different in the latter we must then make the 
necessary changes in the former. The silent, 
subtle forces of mind and spirit, ceaselessly 
at work, are continually moulding these out- 
ward and these bodily conditions. 

He makes a fundamental error who thinks 
that these are mere sentimental things in life, 
vague and intangible. They are, as great num- 
bers are now realising, the great and elemental 
things in life, the only things that in the end 
really count. The normal man or woman can 
never find real and abiding satisfaction in the 
mere possessions, the mere accessories of life. 
There is an eternal something within that 
forbids it. That is the reason why, of late 
years, so many of our big men of affairs, so 
many in various public walks in life, likewise 
many women of splendid equipment and with 
large possessions, have been and are turning 



FOREWORD 5 

so eagerly to the very things we are consider- 
ing. To be a mere huckster, many of our big 
men are finding, cannot bring satisfaction, even 
though his operations run into millions in the 
year. 

And happy is the young man or the young 
woman who, while the bulk of life still lies 
ahead, realises that it is the things of the 
mind and the spirit the fundamental things 
in life that really count; that here lie the 
forces that are to be understood and to be 
used in moulding the every-day conditions 
and affairs of life ; that the springs of life are 
all from within, that as is the inner so always 
and inevitably will be the outer. 

To present certain facts that may be con- 
ducive to the realisation of this more abun- 
dant life is the author's purpose and plan. 

R. W. T. 

Sunnybrat Farm, 

Crolon-on- Hudson, 

Neia York- 



CONTENTS 

Chapter Page 

I. The Silent, Subtle Building Forces of 

Mind and Spirit 9 

II. Soul, Mind, Body The Subconscious 

Mind That Interrelates Them . . 19 

III. The Way Mind Through the Subcon- 

scious Mind Builds Body 37 

IV. The Powerful Aid of the Mind in Re- 

building Body How Body Helps 

Mind 50 

V. Thought as a Force in Daily Living . 63 
VI. Jesus the Supreme Exponent of the 
Inner Forces and Powers: His Peo- 
ple's Religion and Their Condition . 76 
VII. The Divine Rule in the Mind and Heart: 
The Unessentials We Drop The 

Spirit Abides 89 

VIII. If We Seek the Essence of His Revela- 
tion, and the Purpose of His Life . 113 
IX. His Purpose of Lifting Up, Energising, 
Beautifying, and Saving the Entire 
Life: The Saving of the Soul is Sec- 
ondary; but Follows .... 140 
X. Some Methods of Attainment . . . 152 
XI. Some Methods of Expression . . . 173 

XII. The World War Its Meaning and Its 

Lessons for Us 191 

XIII. Our Sole Agency of International 

Peace, and International Concord . 215 
7 



THE HIGHER POWERS 
OF 

MIND AND SPIRIT 



THE SILENT, SUBTLE BUILDING FORCES 
OF MIND AND SPIRIT 

There are moments in the lives of all of us 
when we catch glimpses of a life our life 
that is infinitely beyond the life we are now 
living. We realise that we are living below 
our possibilities. We long fpr the realisation 
of the life that we feel should be. 

Instinctively we perceive that there are 
within us powers and forces that we are mak- 
ing but inadequate use of, and others that 
we are scarcely using at all. Practical meta- 
physics, a more simplified and concrete psy- 
chology, well-known laws of mental and 
spiritual science, confirm us in this conclusion. 

Our own William James, he who so splen- 
didly related psychology, philosophy, and even 
religion, to life in a supreme degree, honoured 
his calling and did a tremendous service for all 
9 



io HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 

mankind, when he so clearly developed the 
fact that we have within us powers and forces 
that we are making all too little use of that 
we have within us great reservoirs of power 
that we have as yet scarcely tapped. 

The men and the women who are awake to 
these inner helps these directing, moulding, 
and sustaining powers and forces that belong 
to the realm of mind and spirit are never to be 
found among those who ask: Is life worth 
the living? For them life has been multiplied 
two, ten, a hundred fold. 

It is not ordinarily because we are not in- 
terested in these things, for instinctively we 
feel them of value; and furthermore our 
observations and experiences confirm us in 
this thought. The pressing cares of the every- 
day life in the great bulk of cases, the bread 
and butter problem of life, which is after all 
the problem of ninety-nine out of every hun- 
dred all seem to conspire to keep us from giv- 
ing the time and attention to them that we 
feel we should give them. But we lose thereby 
tremendous helps to the daily living. 

Through the body and its avenues of sense, 
we are intimately related to the physical uni- 
verse about us. Through the soul and spirit 
we are related to the Infinite Power that is 
the animating, the sustaining force the Life 
Force of all objective material forms. It is 



HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT n 

through the medium of the mind that we are 
able consciously to relate the two. Through 
it we are able to realise the laws that underlie 
the workings of the spirit; and to open our- 
selves that they may become the dominating 
forces of our lives. 

There is a divine current that will bear us 
with peace and safety on its bosom if we are 
wise and diligent enough to find it and go 
with it. Battling against tho current is always 
hard and uncertain. Going with the current 
lightens the labours of the journey. Instead 
of being continually uncertain and even ex- 
hausted in the mere efforts of getting through, 
we have time for the enjoyments along the 
way, as well as the ability to call a word of 
cheer or to lend a hand to the neighbour, also 
on the way. 

The natural, normal life is by a law divine 
under the guidance of the spirit. It is only 
when we fail to seek and to follow this guid- 
ance, or when we deliberately take ourselves 
from under its influence, that uncertainties 
arise, legitimate longings go unfulfilled, and 
that violated laws bring their penalties. 

It is well that we remember always that 
violated law carries with it its own penalty. 
The Supreme Intelligence God, if you please 
does not punish. He works through the 
channel of great immutable systems of law. 



12 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 

It is ours to find these laws. That is what 
mind, intelligence, is for. Knowing them we 
can then obey them and reap the beneficent 
results that are always a part of their ful- 
filment; knowingly or unknowingly, inten- 
tionally or unintentionally, we can fail to 
observe them, we can violate them, and suffer 
the results, or even be broken by them. 

Life is not so complex if we do not so con- 
tinually persist in making it so. Supreme In- 
telligence, creative Power works only through 
law. Science and religion are but different ap- 
proaches to our understanding of the law. 
When both are real, they supplement one an- 
other and their findings are identical. 

The old Hebrew prophets, through the chan- 
nel of the spirit, perceived and enunciated 
some wonderful laws of the natural and nor- 
mal life that are now being confirmed by 
well-established laws of mental and spiritual 
science and that are now producing these 
identical results in the lives of great num- 
bers among us today, when they said : " And 
thine ears shall hear a word behind thee, say- 
ing, This is the way, walk ye in it, when ye 
turn to the right hand and when ye turn to 
the left." 

And again : " The Lord is with you, while 
ye be with him; and if ye seek him, he will 
be found of you; but if ye forsake him, he 



HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 13 

will forsake you." " Thou wilt keep him in 
perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on thee; 
because he trusteth in thee." " The Lord in 
the midst of thee is mighty." " He that dwell- 
eth in the secret place of the Most High shall 
abide under the shadow of the Almighty." 
" Thou shalt be in league with the stones of 
the field, and the beasts of the field shall be at 
peace with thee." " Commit thy way unto 
the Lord: trust also in him and he shall bring 
it to pass." Now these formulations all mean 
something of a very definite nature, or, they 
mean nothing at all. If they are actual ex- 
pressions of fact, they are governed by cer- 
tain definite and immutable laws. 

These men gave us, however, no knowledge 
of the laws underlying the workings of these 
inner forces and powers; they perhaps had no 
such knowledge themselves. They were intui- 
tive perceptions of truth on their part. The 
scientific spirit of this, our age, was entirely 
unknown to them. The growth of the race 
in the meantime, the development of the 
scientific spirit in the pursuit and the finding 
of truth, makes us infinitely beyond them in 
some things, while in others they were far 
ahead of us. But this fact remains, and this 
is the important fact: If these things were 
actual facts in the lives of these early Hebrew 
prophets, they are then actual facts in our 



lives right now, today; or, if not actual facts, 
then they are facts that still lie in the realm of 
the potential, only waiting to be brought into 
the realm of the actual. 

These were not unusual men in the sense 
that the Infinite Power, God, if you please, 
could or did speak to them alone. They are 
types, they are examples of how any man or 
any woman, through desire and through will, 
can open himself or herself to the leadings of 
Divine Wisdom, and have actualised in his 
or her life an ever-growing sense of Divine 
Power. For truly " God is the same yester- 
day, and today, and forever." His laws are 
unchanging as well as immutable. 

None of these men taught, then, how to 
recognise the Divine Voice within, nor how 
to become continually growing embodiments 
of the Divine Power. They gave us perhaps, 
though, all they were able to give. Then came 
Jesus, the successor of this long line of illustri- 
ous Hebrew prophets, with a greater aptitude 
for the things of the spirit the supreme em- 
bodiment of Divine realisation and revelation. 
With a greater knowledge of truth than they, 
he did greater things than they. 

He not only did these works, but he showed 
how he did them. He not only revealed the 
Way, but so earnestly and so diligently he im- 
plored his hearers to follow the Way. He 



HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 15 

makes known the secret of his insight and his 
power : " The words that I speak unto you 
I speak not of myself: but the Father that 
dwelleth in me, he doeth the works." Again, 
" I can of my own self do nothing." And he 
then speaks of his purpose, his aim : " I am 
come that ye might have life, and that ye 
might have it more abundantly." A little 
later he adds : " The works that I do ye shall 
do also." Now again, these things mean 
something of a very definite nature, or they 
mean nothing at all. 

The works done, the results achieved by 
Jesus' own immediate disciples and followers, 
and in turn their followers, as well as in the 
early church for close to two hundred years 
after his time, all attest the truth of his teach- 
ing and demonstrate unmistakably the results 
that follow. 

Down through the intervening centuries, 
the teachings, the lives and the works of vari- 
ous seers, sages, and mystics, within the church 
and out of the church, have likewise attested 
the truth of his teachings. The bulk of the 
Christian world, however, since the third 
century, has been so concerned with various 
theories and teachings concerning Jesus, that 
it has missed almost completely the real vital 
and vitalising teachings of Jesus. 

We have not been taught primarily to fol- 



16 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 

low his injunctions, and to apply the truths 
that he revealed to the problems of our every- 
day living. Within the last two score of years 
or a little more, however, there has been a great 
going back directly to the teachings of Jesus, 
and a determination to prove their truth and 
to make effective their assurances. Also vari- 
ous laws in the realm of Mental and Spiritual 
Science have become clearly established and 
clearly formulated, that confirm all his funda- 
mental teachings. 

There are now definite and well-defined 
laws in relation to thought as a force, and the 
methods as to how it determines our material 
and bodily conditions. There are now certain 
well-defined laws pertaining to the subcon- 
scious mind, its ceaseless building activities, 
how it always takes its direction from the 
active, thinking mind, and how through this 
channel we may connect ourselves with reser- 
voirs of power, so to speak, in an intelligent 
and effective manner. 

There are now well-understood laws under- 
lying mental suggestion, whereby it can be 
made a tremendous source of power in our 
own lives, and can likewise be made an effec- 
tive agency in arousing the motive powers of 
another for his or her healing, habit-forming, 
character-building. There are likewise well- 
established facts not only as to the value, but 



I? 

the absolute need of periods of meditation and 
quiet, alone with the Source of our being, 
stilling the outer bodily senses, and fulfilling 
the conditions whereby the Voice of the Spirit 
can speak to us and through us, and the power 
of the Spirit can manifest in and through us. 

A nation is great only as its people are 
great. Its people are great in the degree that 
they strike the balance between the life of the 
mind and the spirit all the finer forces and 
emotions of life and their outer business 
organisation and activities. When the latter 
become excessive, when they grow at the ex- 
pense of the former, then the inevitable decay 
sets in, that spells the doom of that nation, 
and its time is tolled off in exactly the same 
manner, and under the same law, as has that 
of all the other nations before it that sought 
to reverse the Divine order of life. 

The human soul and its welfare is the high- 
est business that any state can give its atten- 
tion to. To recognise or to fail to recognise 
the value of the human soul in other nations, 
determines its real greatness and grandeur, or 
its self-complacent but essential vacuity. It 
is possible for a nation, through subtle delu- 
sions, to get such an attack of the big head 
that it bends over backwards, and it is liable, 
in this exposed position, to get a thrust in its 
vitals. 



i8 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 

To be carried too far along the road of effi- 
ciency, big business, expansion, world power, 
domination, at the expense of the great spir- 
itual verities, the fundamental humanities of 
national life, that make for the real life and 
welfare of its people, and that give also its 
true and just relations with other nations and 
their people, is both dangerous and in the end 
suicidal it can end in nothing but loss and 
eventual disaster. A silent revolution of 
thought is taking place in the minds of the 
people of all nations at this time, and will 
continue for some years to come. A stock-tak- 
ing period in which tremendous revaluations 
are under way, is on. It is becoming clear- 
cut and decisive. 



II 



SOUL, MIND, BODY THE SUBCONSCIOUS 
MIND THAT INTERRELATES THEM 

There is a notable twofold characteristic of 
this our age we might almost say: of this 
our generation. It is on the one hand a tre- 
mendously far-reaching interest in the deeper 
spiritual realities of life, in the things of the 
mind and the Spirit. On the other hand, 
there is a materialism that is apparent to all, 
likewise far-reaching. We are witnessing the 
two moving along, apparently at least, side by 
side. 

There are those who believe that out of the 
latter the former is arising, that we are wit- 
nessing another great step forward on the 
part of the human race a new era or age, so 
to speak. There are many things that would 
indicate this to be a fact. The fact that the 
material alone does not satisfy, and that from 
the very constitution of the human mind and 
soul, it cannot satisfy, may be a fundamental 
reason for this. 

It may be also that as we are apprehending, 
'9 



ao HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 

to a degree never equalled in the world's his- 
tory, the finer forces in nature, and are using 
them in a very practical and useful way in 
the affairs and the activities of the daily life, 
we are also and perhaps in a more pronounced 
degree, realising, understanding, and using the 
finer, the higher insights and forces, and there- 
fore powers, of mind, of spirit, and of body. 

I think there is a twofold reason for this 
widespread and rapidly increasing interest. 
A new psychology, or perhaps it were better 
to say, some new and more fully established 
laws of psychology, pertaining to the realm 
of the subconscious mind, its nature, and its 
peculiar activities and powers, has brought 
us another agency in life of tremendous sig- 
nificance and of far-reaching practical use. 

Another reason is that the revelation and 
the religion of Jesus the Christ is witnessing 
a new birth, as it were. We are finding at 
last an entirely new content in his teachings, 
as well as in his life. We are dropping our 
interest in those phases of a Christianity that 
he probably never taught, and that we have 
many reasons now to believe he never even 
thought things that were added long years 
after his time. 

We are conscious, however, as never before, 
that that wonderful revelation, those wonder- 
ful teachings, and above all that wonderful 



HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT ai 

life, have a content that can, that does, inspire, 
lift up, and make more effective, more power- 
ful, more successful, and more happy, the life 
of every man and every woman who will ac- 
cept, who will appropriate, who will live his 
teachings. 

Look at it, however we will, this it is that 
accounts for the vast number of earnest, 
thoughtful, forward looking men and women 
who are passing over, and in many cases are 
passing from, traditional Christianity, and 
who either of their own initiative, or under 
other leadership, are going back to those sim- 
ple, direct, God-impelling teachings of the 
Great Master. They are finding salvation in 
his teachings and his example, where they 
never could find it in various phases of the tra- 
ditional teachings about him. 

It is interesting to realise, and it seems al- 
most strange that this new finding in psy- 
chology, and that this new and vital content 
in Christianity, have come about at almost 
identically the same time. Yet it is not 
strange, for the one but serves to demonstrate 
in a concrete and understandable manner the 
fundamental and essential principles of the 
other. Many of the Master's teachings of the 
inner life, teachings of " the Kingdom," given 
so far ahead of his time that the people in 
general, and in many instances even his dis- 



22 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 

ciples, were incapable of fully comprehending 
and understanding them, are now being con- 
firmed and further elucidated by clearly de- 
fined laws of psychology. 

Speculation and belief are giving way to 
a greater knowledge of law. The supernatural 
recedes into the background as we delve 
deeper into the supernormal. The unusual 
loses its miraculous element as we gain knowl- 
edge of the law whereby the thing is done. 
We are realising that no miracle has ever 
been performed in the world's history that 
was not through the understanding and the 
use of Law. 

Jesus did unusual things ; but he did them 
because of his unusual understanding of the 
law through which they could be done. He 
would not have us believe otherwise. To do 
so would be a distinct contradiction of the 
whole tenor of his teachings and his injunc- 
tions. Ye shall know the truth and the truth 
shall make you free, was his own admonition. 
It was the great and passionate longing of his 
master heart that the people to whom he came, 
grasp the interior meanings of his teachings. 
How many times he felt the necessity of rebuk- 
ing even his disciples for dragging his teachings 
down through their material interpretations. 
As some of the very truths that he taught are 
now corroborated and more fully understood, 



HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT aj 

and in some cases amplified by well-established 
laws of psychology, mystery recedes into the 
background. 

We are reconstructing a more natural, a 
more sane, a more common-sense portrait 
of the Master. " It is the spirit that quick- 
eneth," said he ; " the flesh profiteth noth- 
ing; the words that I speak unto you, 
they are spirit and they are life." Shall we 
recall again in this connection : " I am come 
that ye might have life and that ye might 
have it more abundantly"? When, therefore, 
we take him at his word, and listen intently 
to his words, and not so much to the words 
of others about him; when we place our em- 
phasis upon the fundamental spiritual truths 
that he revealed and that he pleaded so 
earnestly to be taken in the simple, direct way 
in which he taught them, we are finding that 
the religion of the Christ means a clearer and 
healthier understanding of life and its prob- 
lems through a greater knowledge of the ele- 
mental forces and laws of life. 

Ignorance enchains and enslaves. Truth 
which is but another way of saying a clear 
and definite knowledge of Law, the elemental 
laws of soul, of mind, and body, and of the uni- 
verse about us brings freedom. Jesus revealed 
essentially a spiritual philosophy of life. His 
whole revelation pertained to the essential 



24 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 

divinity of the human soul and the great gains 
that would follow the realisation of this fact. 
His whole teaching revolved continually 
around his own expression, used again and 
again, the Kingdom of God, or the Kingdom of 
Heaven, and which he so distinctly stated was 
an inner state or consciousness or realisation. 
Something not to be found outside of oneself 
but to be found only within. 

We make a great error to regard man as 
merely a duality mind and body. Man is a 
trinity, soul, mind, and body, each with its 
own functions, and it is the right co-ordinat- 
ing of these that makes the truly efficient and 
eventually the perfect life. Anything less is 
always one-sided and we may say, continually 
out of gear. It is essential to a correct under- 
standing, and therefore for any adequate use 
of the potential powers and forces of the inner 
life, to realise this. 

It is the physical body that relates us to 
the physical universe about us, that in which 
we find ourselves in this present form of exist- 
ence. But the body, wondrous as it is in its 
functions and its mechanism, is not the life. 
It has no life and no power in itself. It is 
of the earth, earthy. Every particle of it has 
come from the earth through the food we 
eat in combination with the air we breathe and 
the water we drink, and every part of it in 



HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 25 

time will go back to the earth. It is the house 
we inhabit while here. 

We can make it a hovel or a mansion; we 
can make it even a pig-sty or a temple, accord- 
ing as the soul, the real self, chooses to func- 
tion through it. We should make it servant, 
but through ignorance of the real powers 
within, we can permit it to become master. 
" Know ye not," said the Great Apostle to 
the Gentiles, " that your body is the temple of 
the Holy Ghost which is in you, which ye 
have of God, and ye are not your own?" 

The soul is the self, the soul made in the 
image of Eternal Divine Life, which, as Jesus 
said, is Spirit. The essential reality of the 
soul is Spirit. Spirit Being is one and indi- 
visible, manifesting itself, however, in individ- 
ual forms in existence. Divine Being and the 
human soul are therefore in essence the same, 
the same in quality. Their difference, which, 
however, is very great though less in some 
cases than in others is a difference in 
degree. 

Divine Being is the cosmic force, the essen- 
tial essence, the Life therefore of all there is 
in existence. The soul is individual personal 
existence. The soul while in this form of 
existence manifests, functions through the 
channel of a material body. It is the mind 
that relates the two. It is through the medium 



26 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 

of the mind that the two must be coordinated. 
The soul, the self, while in this form of exist- 
ence, must have a body through which to 
function. The body, on the other hand, to 
reach and to maintain its highest state, must 
be continually infused with the life force of 
the soul. The life force of the soul is Spirit. 
If spirit, then essentially one with Infinite 
Divine Spirit, for spirit, Being, is one. 

The embodied soul finds itself the tenant of 
a material body in a material universe, and 
according to a plan as yet, at least, beyond 
our human understanding, whatever may be 
our thoughts, our theories regarding it. The 
whole order of life as we see it, all the world 
of Nature about us, and we must believe the 
order of human life, is a gradual evolving from 
the lower to the higher, from the cruder to the 
finer. The purpose of life is unquestionably 
unfoldment, growth, advancement likewise 
the evolving from the lower and the coarser to 
the higher and the finer. 

The higher insights and powers of the soul, 
always potential within, become of value only 
as they are realised and used. Evolution im- 
plies always involution. The substance of all 
we shall ever attain or be, is within us now, 
waiting for realisation and thereby expression. 
The soul carries its own keys to all wisdom 
and to all valuable and usable power. 



HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 27 

It was that highly illumined seer, Emanuel 
Swedenborg, who said : " Every created thing 
is in itself inanimate and dead, but it is ani- 
mated and caused to live by this, that the 
Divine is in it and that it exists in and from 
the Divine." Again: "The universal end of 
creation is that there should be an external 
union of the Creator with the created universe ; 
and this would not be possible unless there 
were beings in whom His Divine might be 
present as if in itself; thus in whom it might 
dwell and abide. To be His abode, they must 
receive His love and wisdom by a power which 
seems to be their own; thus, must lift them- 
selves up to the Creator as if by their own 
power, and unite themselves with Him. With- 
out this mutual action no union would be 
possible." And again: "Every one who duly 
considers the matter may know that the body 
does not think, because it is material, but the 
soul, because it is spiritual. All the rational 
life, therefore, which appears in the body be- 
longs to the spirit, for the matter of the body 
is annexed, and, as it were, joined to the 
spirit, in order that the latter may live and 
perform uses in the natural world. . . . Since 
everything which lives in the body, and acts 
and feels by virtue of that life, belongs to the 
spirit alone, it follows that the spirit is the 
real man; or, what comes to the same thing, 



28 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 

man himself is a spirit, in a form similar to 
that of his body." 

Spirit being the real man, it follows that 
the great, central fact of all experience, of all 
human life, is the coming into a conscious, 
vital realisation of our source, of our real 
being, in other words, of our essential oneness 
with the spirit of Infinite Life and Power 
the source of all life and all power. We need 
not look for outside help when we have within 
us waiting to be realised, and thereby actual- 
ised, this Divine birthright. 

Browning was prophet as well as poet 
when in " Paracelsus " he said : 

Truth is within ourselves ; it takes no rise 
From outward things, whate'er you may be- 
lieve. 

There is an inmost centre in us all, 
Where truth abides in fulness; and around 
Wall upon wall, the gross flesh hems it in, 
This perfect, clear perception which is truth. 
A baffling and perverting carnal mesh 
Binds it, and makes all error : and, to know 
Rather consists in opening out a way 
Whence the imprisoned splendour may escape, 
Than in effecting entry for a light 
Supposed to be without. 

How strangely similar in meaning it seems 
to that saying of an earlier prophet, Isaiah: 



HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 29 

" And thine ears shall hear a word behind thee, 
saying, This is the way, walk ye in it, when 
ye turn to the right hand and when ye turn 
to the left." 

All great educators are men of great vision. 
It was Dr. Hiram Corson who said : " It is 
what man draws up from his sub-self which is 
of prime importance in his true education, not 
what is put into him. It is the occasional 
uprising of our sub-selves that causes us, at 
times, to feel that we are greater than we 
know." A new psychology, spiritual science, 
a more commonsense interpretation of the 
great revelation of the Christ of Nazareth, all 
combine to enable us to make this occasional 
uprising our natural and normal state. 

No man has probably influenced the educa- 
tional thought and practice of the entire world 
more than Friedrich Froebel. In that great book 
of his, " The Education of Man," he bases his 
entire system upon the following, which con- 
stitutes the opening of its first chapter : " In all 
things there lives and reigns an eternal law. 
This all-controlling law is necessarily based 
on an all-pervading, energetic, living, self- 
conscious, and hence eternal, Unity. . . . This 
Unity is God. All things have come from the 
Divine Unity, from God, and have their origin 
in the Divine Unity, in God alone. God is the 
sole source of all things. All things live and 



30 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 

have their being in and through the Divine 
Unity, in and through God. All things are 
only through the divine effluence that lives in 
them. The divine effluence that lives in each 
thing is the essence of each thing. 

" It is the destiny and life work of all things 
to unfold their essence, hence their divine 
being, and, therefore, the Divine Unity itself 
to reveal God in their external and transient 
being. It is the special destiny and life work 
of man, as an intelligent and rational being, 
to become fully, vividly, conscious of this 
essence of the divine effluence in him, and 
therefore of God. 

" The precept for life in general and for 
every one is: Exhibit only tiny spiritual, thy 
life, in the external, and by means of the ex- 
ternal in thy actions, and observe the require- 
ments of thy inner being and its nature." 

Here is not only an undying basis for all 
real education, but also the basis of all true 
religion, as well as the basis of all ideal phi- 
losophy. Yes, there could be no evolution, un- 
less the essence of all to be evolved, unfolded, 
were already involved in the human soul. To 
follow the higher leadings of the soul, which 
is so constituted that it is the inlet, and as a 
consequence the outlet of Divine Spirit, Crea- 
tive Energy, the real source of all wisdom 
and power; to project its leadings into every 



HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 31 

phase of material activity and endeavour, con- 
stitutes the ideal life. It was Emerson who 
said : " Every soul is not only the inlet, but 
may become the outlet of all there is in God." 
To keep this inlet open, so as not to shut out 
the Divine inflow, is the secret of all higher 
achievement, as well as attainment. 

There is a wood separated by a single open 
field from my house. In it, halfway down a 
little hillside, there was some years ago a 
spring. It was at one time walled up with 
rather large loose stone some three feet 
across at the top. In following a vaguely de- 
fined trail through the wood one day in the 
early spring, a trail at one time evidently con- 
siderably used, it led me to this spot. I looked 
at the stone enclosure, partly moss-grown. 
I wondered why, although the ground was 
wet around it, there was no water in or run- 
ning from what had evidently been at one 
time a well-used spring. 

A few days later when the early summer 
work was better under way, I took an imple- 
ment or two over, and half scratching, half 
digging inside the little wall, I found layer 
after layer of dead leaves and sediment, dead 
leaves and sediment. Presently water became 
evident, and a little later it began to rise within 
the wall. In a short time there was nearly 
three feet of water. It was cloudy, no bottom 



32 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 

could be seen. I sat down and waited for it to 
settle. 

Presently I discerned a ledge bottom and 
the side against the hill was also ledge. On 
this side, close to the bottom, I caught that 
peculiar movement of little particles of silvery 
sand, and looking more closely I could see a 
cleft in the rock where the water came gush- 
ing and bubbling in. Soon the entire spring 
became clear as crystal, and the water finding 
evidently its old outlet, made its way down 
the little hillside. I was soon able to trace 
and to uncover its course as it made its way 
to the level place below. 

As the summer went on I found myself 
going to the spot again and again. Flowers 
that I found in no other part of the wood, 
before the autumn came were blooming along 
the little watercourse. Birds in abundance 
came to drink and to bathe. Several times I 
have found the half-tame deer there. Twice 
we were but thirty to forty paces apart. 
They have watched my approach, and as I 
stopped, have gone on with their drinking, 
evidently unafraid as if it were likewise their 
possession. And so it is. 

After spending a most valuable hour or two 
in the quiet there one afternoon, I could not 
help but wonder as I walked home whether 
perchance the spring may not be actually 



HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 33 

happy in being able to resume its life, to ful- 
fil, so to speak, its destiny; happy also in the 
service it renders flowers and the living wild 
things happy in the service it renders even 
me. I am doubly happy and a hundred times 
repaid in the little help I gave it. It needed 
help, to enable it effectively to keep connection 
with its source. As it became gradually shut 
off from this, it weakened, became then stag- 
nant, and finally it ceased its active life. 

Containing a fundamental truth deeper per- 
haps than we realise, are these words of that 
gifted seer, Emanuel Swedenborg : " There is 
only one Fountain of Life, and the life of 
man is a stream therefrom, which if it were 
not continually replenished from its source 
would instantly cease to flow." And likewise 
these : " Those who think in the light of in- 
terior reason can see that all things are con- 
nected by intermediate links with the First 
Cause, and that whatever is not maintained 
in that connection must cease to exist." 

There is a mystic force that transcends any 
powers of the intellect or of the body, that 
becomes manifest and operative in the life 
of man when this God-consciousness becomes 
awakened and permeates his entire being. 
Failure to realise and to keep in constant com- 
munion with our Source is what causes fears, 
forebodings, worry, inharmony, conflict, con- 



34 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 

flict that downs us many times in mind, in 
spirit, in body failure to follow that Light 
that lighteth every man that cometh into the 
world, failure to hear and to heed that Voice 
of the soul, that speaks continually clearer as 
we accustom ourselves to listen to and to heed 
it, failure to follow those intuitions with which 
the soul, every soul, is endowed, and that lead 
us aright and that become clearer in their lead- 
ings as we follow them. It is this guidance 
and this sustaining power that all great souls 
fall back upon in times of great crises. 

This single stanza by Edwin Markham 
voices the poet's inspiration: 

At the heart of the cyclone tearing the sky, 
And flinging the clouds and the towers by, 

Is a place of central calm; 
So, here in the roar of mortal things 
I have a place where my spirit sings, 

In the hollow of God's palm. 

" That the Divine Life and Energy actually 
lives in us," was the philosopher Fichte's reply 
to the proposition " the profoundest knowl- 
edge that man can attain." And speaking of 
the man to whom this becomes a real, vital, 
conscious realisation, he said : " His. whole ex- 
istence flows forth, softly and gently, from his 
Inward Being, and issues out into Reality 
without difficulty or hindrance." 



HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 35 

There are certain faculties that we have 
that are not a part of the active thinking mind ; 
they seem to be no part of what we might 
term our conscious intelligence. They tran- 
scend any possible activities of our regular 
mental processes, and they are in some 
ways independent of them. Through some 
avenue, suggestions, intuitions of truth, in- 
tuitions of occurrences of which through the 
thinking mind we could know nothing, are at 
times borne in upon us; they flash into our 
consciousness, as we say, quite independent of 
any mental action on our part, and sometimes 
when we are thinking of something quite 
foreign to that which comes to, that which 
" impresses " us. 

This seems to indicate a source of knowl- 
edge, a faculty that is distinct from, but that 
acts in various ways in conjunction with, the 
active thinking mind. It performs likewise 
certain very definite and distinct functions in 
connection with the body. It is this that is 
called the subconscious mind by some the 
superconscious or the supernormal mind, by 
others the subliminal self. 

Just what the subconscious mind is no man 
knows. It is easier to define its functions and 
to describe its activities than it is to state 
in exact terms what it is. It is similar in this 
respect to the physical force if it be a physical 



36 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 

force electricity. It is only of late years that 
we know anything of electricity at all. To-day 
we know a great deal of its nature and the 
laws of its action. No man living can tell 
exactly what electricity is. We are neverthe- 
less making wonderful practical applications 
of it. We are learning more about it con- 
tinually. Some day we may know what 
it actually is. 

The fact that the subconscious mind seems 
to function in a realm apart from anything 
that has to do with our conscious mental 
processes, and also that it has some definite 
functions as both directing and building func- 
tions to perform in connection with the body, 
and that it is at the same time subject to sug- 
gestion and direction from the active think- 
ing mind, would indicate that it may be the 
true connecting link, the medium of exchange, 
between the soul and the body, the connector 
of the spiritual and the material so far as man 
is concerned. 



Ill 



THE WAY MIND THROUGH THE SUBCON- 
SCIOUS MIND BUILDS BODY 

When one says that he numbers among his 
acquaintances some who are as old at sixty as 
some others are at eighty, he but gives expres- 
sion to a fact that has become the common 
possession of many. I have known those who 
at fifty-five and sixty were to all intents and 
purposes really older, more decrepit, and 
rapidly growing still more decrepit both in 
mind and body, than many another at seventy 
and seventy-five and even at eighty. 

History, then, is replete with instances, 
memorable instances, of people, both men and 
women, who have accomplished things at an 
age who have even begun and carried through 
to successful completion things at an age that 
would seem to thousands of others, in the cap- 
tivity of age, with their backs to the future, 
ridiculous even to think of accomplishing, much 
less of beginning. On account of a certain 
law that has always seemed to me to exist and 
that I am now firmly convinced is very exact 
in its workings, I have been interested in talk- 
ing with various ones and in getting together 
37 



38 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 

various facts relative to this great discrepancy 
in the ages of these two classes of " old " 
people. 

Within the year I called upon a friend 
whom, on account of living in a different por- 
tion of the country, I hadn't seen for nearly 
ten years. Conversation revealed to me the 
fact that he was then in his eighty-eighth year. 
I could notice scarcely a change in his appear- 
ance, walk, voice, and spirit. We talked at 
length upon the various, so-called, periods of 
life. He told me that about the only differ- 
ence that he noticed in himself as compared 
with his middle life was that now when he 
goes out to work in his garden, and among his 
trees, bushes, and vines and he has had many 
for many years he finds that he is quite ready 
to quit and to come in at the end of about two 
hours, and sometimes a little sooner, when 
formerly he could work regularly without fa- 
tigue for the entire half day. In other words, 
he has not the same degree of endurance that 
he once had. 

Among others, there comes to mind in this 
connection another who is a little under 
seventy. It chances to be a woman. She is 
bent and decrepit and growing more so by 
very fixed stages each twelvemonth. I have 
known her for over a dozen years. At the 
time when I first knew her she was scarcely 



HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 39 

fifty-eight, she was already bent and walked 
with an uncertain, almost faltering tread. The 
dominant note of her personality was then as 
now, but more so now, fear for the present, 
fear for the future, a dwelling continually on 
her ills, her misfortunes, her symptoms, her ap- 
proaching and increasing helplessness. 

Such cases I have observed again and again ; 
so have all who are at all interested in life and 
in its forces and its problems. What is the 
cause of this almost world-wide difference in 
these two lives? In this case it is as clear as 
day the mental characteristics and the mental 
habits of each. 

In the first case, here was one who early got 
a little philosophy into his life and then more 
as the years passed. He early realised that in 
himself his good or his ill fortune lay ; that the 
mental attitude we take toward anything de- 
termines to a great extent our power in connec- 
tion with it, as well as its effects upon us. He 
grew to love his work and he did it daily, but 
never under high pressure. He was therefore 
benefited by it. His face was always to the 
future, even as it is to-day. This he made one 
of the fundamental rules of his life. He was 
helped in this, he told me in substance, by an 
early faith which with the passing of the years 
has ripened with him into a demonstrable con- 
viction that there is a Spirit of Infinite Life 



40 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 

back of all, working in love in and through the 
lives of all, and that in the degree that we 
realise it as the one Supreme Source of our 
lives, and when through desire and will, which 
is through the channel of our thoughts, we open 
our lives so that this Higher Power can work 
definitely in and through us, and then go 
about and do our daily work without fears or 
forebodings, the passing of the years sees only 
the highest good entering into our lives. 

In the case of the other one whom we have 
mentioned, a repetition seems scarcely neces- 
sary. Suffice it to say that the common expres- 
sion on the part of those who know her I have 
heard it numbers of times is : " What a bless- 
ing it will be to herself and to others when she 
has gone ! " 

A very general rule with but few exceptions 
can be laid down as follows: The body ordi- 
narily looks as old as- the mind thinks and 
feels. 

Shakespeare anticipated by many years the 
best psychology of the times when he said : " It 
is the mind that makes the body rich." 

It seems to me that our great problem, or 
rather our chief concern, should not be so 
much how to stay young in the sense of pos- 
sessing all the attributes of youth, for the 
passing of the years does bring changes, but 
how to pass gracefully, and even magnificently, 



HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 41 

and with undiminished vigour from youth to 
middle age, and then how to carry that mid- 
dle age into approaching old age, with a great 
deal more of the vigour and the outlook of 
middle life than ice ordinarily do. 

The mental as well as the physical helps that 
are now in the possession of this our genera- 
tion, are capable of working a revolution in 
the lives of many who are or who may become 
sufficiently awake to them, so that with them 
there will not be that shall we say immature 
passing from middle life into a broken, pur- 
poseless, decrepit, and sunless, and one might 
almost say, soulless old age. 

It seems too bad that so many among us just 
at the time that they have become of most use 
to themselves, their families, and to the world, 
should suddenly halt and then continue in 
broken health, and in so many cases lie down 
and die. Increasing numbers of thinking peo- 
ple the world over are now, as never before, 
finding that this is not necessary, that some- 
thing is at fault, that that fault is in ourselves. 
If so, then reversely, the remedy lies in our- 
selves, in our own hands, so to speak. 

In order to aetualise and to live this better 
type of life we have got to live better from 
both sides, both the mental and the physical, 
this with all due respect to Shakespeare and to 
all modern mental scientists. 



42 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 

The body itself, what we term the physical 
body, whatever may be the facts regarding a 
finer spiritual body within it all the time giv- 
ing form to and animating and directing all 
its movements, is of material origin, and de- 
rives its sustenance from the food we take, 
from the air we breathe, the water we drink. 
In this sense it is from the earth, and when 
we are through with it, it will go back to the 
earth. 

The body, however, is not the Life; it is 
merely the material agency that enables the 
Life to manifest in a material universe for 
a certain, though not necessarily a given, period 
of time. It is the Life, or the Soul, or the 
Personality that uses, and that in using shapes 
and moulds, the body and that also determines 
its strength or its weakness. When this is 
separated from the body, the body at once be- 
comes a cold, inert mass, commencing immedi- 
ately to decompose into the constituent ma- 
terial elements that composed it literally go- 
ing back to the earth and the elements whence 
it came. 

It is through the instrumentality or the 
agency of thought that the Life, the Self, uses, 
and manifests through, the body. Again, while 
it is true that the food that is taken and as- 
similated nourishes, sustains and builds the 
body, it is also true that the condition and the 



HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 43 

operation of the mind through the avenue of 
thought determines into what shape or form 
the body is so builded. So in this sense it is 
true that mind builds body ; it is the agency, the 
force that determines the shaping of the ma- 
terial elements. 

Here is a wall being built. Bricks are the 
material used in its construction. We do not 
say that the bricks are building the wall; we 
say that the mason is building it, as is the case. 
He is using the material that is supplied him, 
in this case bricks, giving form and structure 
in a definite, methodical manner. Again, back 
of the mason is his mind, acting through the 
channel of his thought, that is directing his 
hands and all his movements. Without this 
guiding, directing force no wall could take 
shape, even if millions of bricks were delivered 
upon the scene. 

So it is with the body. We take the food, 
the water, we breathe the air; but this is all 
and always acted upon by a higher force. Thus 
it is that mind builds body, the same as in 
every department of our being it is the great 
builder. Our thoughts shape and determine 
our features, our walk, the posture of our 
bodies, our voices; they determine the effec- 
tiveness of our mental and our physical activi- 
ties, as well as all our relations with and 
influence or effects upon others. 



44 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 

You say : " I admit the operation of and even 
in certain cases the power of thought, also that 
at times it has an influence upon our general 
feelings, but I do not admit that it can have 
any direct influence upon the body." Here is 
one who has allowed herself to be long given 
to grief, abnormally so notice her lowered 
physical condition, her lack of vitality. The 
New York papers within the past twelve 
months recorded the case of a young lady in 
New Jersey who, from constant grieving over 
the death of her mother, died, fell dead, within 
a week. 

A man is handed a telegram. He is eating 
and enjoying his dinner. He reads the con- 
tents of the message. Almost immediately 
afterward, his body is a-tremble, his face either 
reddens or grows " ashy white," his appetite is 
gone ; such is the effect of the mind upon the 
stomach that it literally refuses the food; if 
forced upon it, it may reject it entirely. 

A message is delivered to a lady. She is in 
a genial, happy mood. Her face whitens; she 
trembles and her body falls to the ground in 
a faint, temporarily helpless, apparently life- 
less. Such are the intimate relations between 
the mind and the body. Raise a cry of fire in 
a crowded theatre. It may be a false alarm. 
There are among the audience those who be- 
come seemingly palsied, powerless to move. It 



HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 45 

is the state of the mind, and within several 
seconds, that has determined the state of these 
bodies. Such are examples of the wonderfully 
quick influence of the mind on the body. 

Great stress, or anxiety, or fear, may in two 
weeks' or even in two days' time so work its 
ravages that the person looks ten years or even 
twenty years older. A person has been long 
given to worry, or perhaps to worry in extreme 
form though not so long a well-defined case 
of indigestion and general stomach trouble, 
with a generally lowered and sluggish vitality, 
has become pronounced and fixed. 

Any type of thought that prevails in our 
mental lives will in time produce its corre- 
spondences in our physical lives. As we under- 
stand better these laws of correspondences, we 
will be more careful as to the types of thoughts 
and emotions we consciously, or unwittingly, 
entertain and live with. The great bulk of all 
diseases, we will find, as we are continually 
finding more and more, are in the mind before 
being in the body, or are generated in the body 
through certain states and conditions of mind. 

The present state and condition of the body 
have been produced primarily by the thoughts 
that have been taken by the conscious mind 
into the subconscious, that is so intimately 
related to and that directs all the subconscious 
and involuntary functions of the body. Says 



46 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 

one: It may be true that the mind has had 
certain effects upon the body; but to be able 
consciously to affect the body through the mind 
is impossible and even unthinkable, for the 
body is a solid, fixed, material form. 

We must get over the idea, as we quickly 
will, if we study into the matter, that the 
body, in fact anything that we call material 
and solid, is really solid. Even in the case of a 
piece of material as " solid " as a bar of steel, 
the atoms forming the molecules are in con- 
tinual action each in conjunction with its 
neighbour. In the last analysis the body is 
composed of cells cells of bone, vital organ, 
flesh, sinew. In the body the cells are con- 
tinually changing, forming and reforming. 
Death would quickly take place were this not 
true. Nature is giving us a new body prac- 
tically every year. 

There are very few elements, cells, in the 
body of today that were there a year ago. 
The rapidity with which a cut or wound on 
the body is replaced by healthy tissue, the 
rapidity with which it heals, is an illustration 
of this. One " touches " himself in shaving. 
In a week, sometimes in less than a week, if the 
blood and the cell structure be particularly 
healthy, there is no trace of the cut, the forma- 
tion of new cell tissue has completely re- 
paired it. Through the formation of new 



HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 47 

cell structure the life-force within, acting 
through the blood, is able to rebuild and 
repair, if not too much interfered with, very 
rapidly. The reason, we may say almost the 
sole reason, that surgery has made such great 
advances during the past few years, so much 
greater correspondingly than medicine, is on 
account of a knowledge of the importance of 
and the use of antiseptics keeping the wound 
clean and entirely free from all extraneous 
matter. 

So then, the greater portion of the body is 
really new, therefore young, in that it is almost 
entirely this year's growth. Newness of form 
is continually being produced in the body by 
virtue of this process of perpetual renewal that 
is continually going on, and the new cells and 
tissues are just as new as is the new leaf that 
comes forth in the springtime to take the place 
of and to perform the same functions as the 
one that was thrown off by the tree last 
autumn. 

The skin renews itself through the casting off 
of used cells (those that have already per- 
formed their functions) most rapidly, taking 
but a few weeks. The muscles, the vital or- 
gans, the entire arterial system, the brain and 
the nervous system all take longer, but all are 
practically renewed within a year, some in 
much less time. Then comes the bony struc- 



48 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 

ture, taking the longest, varying, we are told, 
from seven and eight months to a year, in 
unusual cases fourteen months and longer. 

It is, then, through this process of cell forma- 
tion that the physical body has been built up, 
and through the same process that it is con- 
tinually renewing itself. It is not therefore 
at any time or at any age a solid fixed mass or 
material, but a structure in a continually 
changing fluid form. It is therefore easy to 
see how we have it in our power, when we are 
once awake to the relations between the con- 
scious mind and the subconscious and it in 
turn in its relations to the various involuntary 
and vital functions of the body to determine 
to a great extent how the body shall be built 
or how it shall be rebuilt. 

Mentally to live in any state or attitude of 
mind is to take that state or condition into the 
subconscious. The subconscious mind does and 
always will produce in the body after its own 
kind. It is through this law that we external- 
ise and become in body what we live in our 
minds. If we have predominating visions of 
and harbour thoughts of old age and weakness, 
this state, with all its attendant circumstances, 
will become externalised in our bodies far more 
quickly than if we entertain thoughts and 
visions of a different type. Said Archdeacon 
Wilberforce in a notable address in Westmin- 



HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 49 

ster Abbey some time ago : " The recent re- 
searches of scientific men, endorsed by experi- 
ments in the Salpetriere in Paris, have drawn 
attention to the intensely creative power of 
suggestions made by the conscious mind to the 
subconscious mind." 



IV 



THE POWERFUL AID OF THE MIND IN 

REBUILDING BODY HOW BODY 

HELPS MIND 

" The body looks," some one has said, " as 
old as the mind feels." By virtue of a great 
mental law and at the same time chemical 
law we are well within the realm of truth 
when we say: The body ordinarily is as old 
as the mind feels. 

Every living organism is continually going 
through two processes : it is continually dying, 
and continually being renewed through the 
operation and the power of the Life Force 
within it. In the human body it is through the 
instrumentality of the cell that this process is 
going on. The cell is the ultimate constituent 
in the formation and in the life of tissue, fibre, 
tendon, bone, muscle, brain, nerve system, 
vital organ. It is the instrumentality that Na- 
ture, as we say, uses to do her work. 

The cell is formed; it does its work; it 
serves its purpose and dies ; and all the while 
new cells are being formed to take its place. 
This process of new cell formation is going on 
in the body of each of us much more rapidly 

So 



HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 51 

and uniformly than we think. Science has 
demonstrated the fact that there are very few 
cells in the body today that were there twelve 
months ago. The form of the body remains 
practically the same; but its constituent ele- 
ments are in a constant state of change. The 
body, therefore, is continually changing; it is 
never in a fixed state in the sense of being a 
solid, but is always in a changing, fluid state. 
It is being continually remade. 

It is the Life, or the Life Force within, act- 
ing under the direction and guidance of the 
subconscious or subjective mind that is the 
agency through which this continually new cell- 
formation process is going on. The subcon- 
scious mind is, nevertheless, always subject to 
suggestions and impressions that are conveyed 
to it by the conscious or sense mind ; and here 
lies the great fact, the one all-important fact 
for us so far as desirable or undesirable, so 
far as healthy or unhealthy, so far as normal or 
aging body-building is concerned. 

That we have it in our power to determine 
our physical and bodily conditions to a far 
greater extent than we do is an undeniable fact. 
That we have it in our power to determine and 
to dictate the conditions of " old age " to a 
marvellous degree is also an undeniable fact 
if we are sufficiently keen and sufficiently 
awake to begin early enough. 



52 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 

If any arbitrary divisions of the various 
periods of life were allowable, I should make 
the enumeration as follows : Youth, barring the 
period of babyhood, to forty-five; middle age, 
forty-five to sixty; approaching age, sixty to 
seventy-five.; old age, seventy-five to ninety- 
five and a hundred. 

That great army of people who " age " long 
before their time, that likewise great army of 
both men and women who along about middle 
age, say from forty-five to sixty, break and, as 
we say, all of a sudden go to pieces, and many 
die, just at the period when they should be in 
the prime of life, in the full vigour of manhood 
and womanhood and of greatest value to them- 
selves, to their families, and to the world, is 
something that is contrary to nature, and is 
one of the pitiable conditions of our time. A 
greater knowledge, a little foresight, a little 
care in time could prevent this in the great 
majority of cases, in ninety cases out of every 
hundred, without question. 

Abounding health and strength wholeness 
is the natural law of the body. The Life 
Force of the body, acting always under the 
direction of the subconscious mind, will build, 
and always does build, healthily and normally, 
unless too much interfered with. It is this 
that determines the type of the cell structure 
that is continually being built into the body 



HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 53 

from the available portions of the food that 
we take to give nourishment to the body. It 
is affected for good or for bad, helped or hin- 
dered, in its operation by the type of con- 
scious thought that is directed toward it, and 
that it is always influenced by. 

Of great suggestive value is the following 
by an able writer and practitioner : 

" God has managed, and perpetually man- 
ages, to insert into our nature a tendency 
toward health, and against the unnatural con- 
dition which we call disease. When our flesh 
receives a wound, a strange nursing and heal- 
ing process is immediately commenced to repair 
the injury. So in all diseases, organic or func- 
tional, this mysterious healing power sets itself 
to work at once to triumph over the morbid 
condition. . . . Cannot this healing process be 
greatly accelerated by a voluntary and con- 
scious action of the mind, assisted, if need be, 
by some other person? I unhesitatingly affirm, 
from experience and observation, that it can. 
By some volitional, mental effort and process 
of thought, this sanative colatus, or healing 
power which God has given to our physiologi- 
cal organism, may be greatly quickened and 
intensified in its action upon the body. Here 
is the secret philosophy of the cures effected 
by Jesus Christ. . . . There is a law of the 
action of mind on the body that is no more an 



54 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 

impenetrable mystery than the law of gravita* 
tion. It can be understood and acted upon 
in the cure of disease as well as any other law 
of nature." 

If, then, it be possible through this process 
to change physical conditions in the body even 
after they have taken form and have become 
fixed, as we say, isn't it possible even more 
easily to determine the type of cell structure 
that is grown in the first place ? 

The ablest rrfinds in the world have thought 
and are thinking that if we could find a way 
of preventing the hardening of the cells of the 
system, producing in turn hardened arteries 
and what is meant by the general term " ossi- 
fication," that the process of aging, growing 
old, could be greatly retarded, and that the 
condition of perpetual youth that we seem to 
catch glimpses of in rare individuals here and 
there could be made a more common occur- 
rence than we find it to-day. 

The cause of ossification is partly mental, 
partly physical, and in connection with them 
both are hereditary influences and conditions 
that have to be taken into consideration. 

Shall we look for a moment to the first? The 
food that is taken into the system, or the avail- 
able portions of the food, is the building ma- 
terial ; but the mind is always the builder. 

There are, then, two realms of mind, the 



HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 55 

conscious and the subconscious. Another way 
of expressing it would be to say that mind 
functions through two avenues the avenue of 
the conscious and the avenue of the subcon- 
scious. The conscious is the thinking mind; 
the subconscious is the doing mind. The con- 
scious is the sense mind, it comes in contact 
with and is acted upon through the avenue of 
the five senses. The subconscious is that 
quiet, finer, all-permeating inner mind or force 
that guides all the inner functions, the life 
functions of the body, and that watches over 
and keeps them going even when we are utterly 
unconscious in sleep. The conscious suggests 
and gives directions ; the subconscious receives 
and carries into operation the suggestions that 
are received. 

The thoughts, ideas, and even beliefs and 
emotions of the conscious mind are the seeds 
that are taken in by the subconscious and that 
in this great realm of causation will germinate 
and produce of their own kind. The chemical 
activities that go on in the process of cell 
formation in the body are all under the in- 
fluence, the domination of this great all-per- 
meating subconscious, or subjective realm 
within us. 

In that able work, " The Laws of Psychic 
Phenomena," Dr. Thomas J. Hudson lays down 
this proposition : " That the subjective mind is 



56 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 

constantly amenable to control by suggestion." 
It is easy, when we once understand and appre- 
ciate this great fact, to see how the body builds, 
or rather is built, for health and strength, or 
for disease and weakness; for youth and 
vigour, or for premature ossification and age. 
It is easy, then, to see how we can have a hand 
in, in brief can have the controlling hand in, 
building either the one or the other. 

It is in the province of the intelligent man or 
woman to take hold of the wheel, so to speak, 
and to determine as an intelligent human being 
should, what condition or conditions shall be 
given birth and form to and be externalised in 
the body. 

A noted thinker and writer has said : " What- 
ever the mind is set upon, or whatever it keeps 
most in view, that it is bringing to it, and the 
continual thought or imagining must at last 
take form and shape in the world of seen and 
tangible things." 

And now, to be as concrete as possible, we 
have these facts: The body is continually 
changing in that it is continually throwing out 
and off, used cells, and continually building 
new cells to take their places. This process, 
as well as all the inner functions of the body, 
is governed and guarded by the subconscious 
realm of our being. The subconscious can do 
and does do whatever it is actually directed to 



HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 57 

do by the conscious, thinking mind. " We 
must be careful on what we allow our minds 
to dwell," said Sir John Lubbock, " the soul 
is dyed by its thoughts." 

If we believe ourselves subject to weakness, 
decay, infirmity, when we should be " whole," 
the subconscious mind seizes upon the pattern 
that is sent it and builds cell structure accord- 
ingly. This is one great reason why one who 
is, as we say, chronically thinking and talking 
of his ailments and symptoms, who is com- 
plaining and fearing, is never well. 

To see one's self, to believe, and therefore 
to picture one's self in mind as strong, healthy, 
active, well, is to furnish a pattern, is to give 
suggestion and therefore direction to the sub- 
conscious so that it will build cell tissue hav- 
ing the stamp and the force of healthy, vital, 
active life, which in turn means abounding 
health and strength. 

So, likewise, at about the time that " old 
age " is supposed ordinarily to begin, when it is 
believed in and looked for by those about us 
and those who act in accordance with this 
thought, if we fall into this same mental drift, 
we furnish the subconscious the pattern that it 
will inevitably build bodily conditions in ac- 
cordance with. We will then find the ordi- 
narily understood marks and conditions of old 
age creeping upon us, and we will become sub- 



58 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 

ject to their influences in every department of 
our being. Whatever is thus pictured in the 
mind and lived in, the Life Force will produce. 

To remain young in mind, in spirit, in feel- 
ing, is to remain young in body. Growing old 
at the period or age at which so many grow old, 
is to a great extent a matter of habit. 

To think health and strength, to see our- 
selves continually growing in this condition, 
is to set into operation the subtlest dynamic 
force for the externalisation of these conditions 
in the body that can be even conceived of. If 
one's bodily condition, through abnormal, false 
mental and emotional habits, has become ab- 
normal and diseased, this same attitude of 
mind, of spirit, of imagery, is to set into opera- 
tion a subtle and powerful corrective agency 
that, if persisted in, will inevitably tend to 
bring normal, healthy conditions to the front 
again. 

True, if these abnormal, diseased conditions 
have been helped on or have been induced by 
wrong physical habits, by the violation of 
physical laws, this violation must cease. But 
combine the two, and then give the body the 
care that it requires in a moderate amount of 
simple, wholesome food, regular cleansing to 
assist it in the elimination of impurities and of 
used cell structure that is being regularly cast 
off, an abundance of pure air and of moderate 



HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 59 

exercise, and a change amounting almost to 
a miracle can be wrought it may be, indeed, 
what many people of olden time would have 
termed a miracle. 

The mind thus becomes " a silent, transform- 
ing, sanative energy " of great potency and 
power. That it can be so used is attested by 
the fact of the large numbers, and the rapidly 
increasing numbers, all about us who are so 
using it. This is what many people all over 
our country are doing to-day, with the results 
that, by a great elemental law Divine Law if 
you choose many are curing themselves of 
various diseases, many are exchanging weak- 
ness and impotence for strength and power, 
many are ceasing, comparatively speaking, are 
politely refusing, to grow old. 

Thought is a force, subtle and powerful, and 
it tends inevitably to produce of its kind. 

In forestalling " old age," at least old age 
of the decrepit type, it is the period of middle 
life where the greatest care is to be employed. 
If, at about the time " old age " is supposed 
ordinarily to begin, the " turn ** at middle life 
or a little later, we would stop to consider 
what this period really means, that it means 
with both men and women a period of life 
where some simple readjustments are to be 
made, a period of a little rest, a little letting 
up, a temporary getting back to the playtime 



5o HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 

of earlier years and a bringing of these char- 
acteristics back into life again, then a complete 
letting-up would not be demanded by nature 
a little later, as it is demanded in such a 
lamentably large number of cases at the 
present time. 

So in a definite, deliberate way, youth should 
be blended into the middle life, and the re- 
sultant should be a force that will stretch mid- 
dle life for an indefinite period into the future. 

And what an opportunity is here for mothers, 
at about the time that the children have grown, 
and some or all even have " flown " ! Of 
course, Mother shouldn't go and get foolish, 
she shouldn't go cavorting around in a sixteen- 
year-old hat, when the hat of the thirty-five- 
year-old would undoubtedly suit her better; 
but she should rejoice that the golden period 
of life is still before her. Now she has leisure 
to do many of those things that she has so 
long wanted to do. 

The world's rich field of literature is before 
her ; the line of study or work she has longed to 
pursue, she bringing to it a better equipped 
mind and experience than she has ever had be- 
fore. There is also an interest in the life and 
welfare of her community, in civic, public wel- 
fare lines that the present and the quick- 
coming time before us along women's enfran- 
chisement lines, along women's commonsense 



HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 61 

equality lines, is making her a responsible and 
full sharer in. And how much more valuable 
she makes herself, also, to her children, as 
well as to her community, inspiring in them 
greater confidence, respect, and admiration 
than if she allows herself to be pushed into the 
background by her own weak and false 
thoughts of herself, or by the equally foolish 
thoughts of her children in that she is now, or 
is at any time, to become a back number. 

Life, as long as we are here, should mean 
continuous unfoldment, advancement, and this 
is undoubtedly the purpose of life; but age- 
producing forces and agencies mean deteriora- 
tion, as opposed to growth and unfoldment. 
They ossify, weaken, stiffen, deaden, both men- 
tally and physically. For him or her who 
yearns to stay young, the coming of the years 
does not mean or bring abandonment of hope 
or of happiness or of activity. It means com- 
parative vigour combined with continually 
larger experience, and therefore even more 
usefulness, and hence pleasure and happiness. 

Praise also to those who do not allow any 
one or any number of occurrences in life to 
sour their nature, rob them of their faith, or 
cripple their energies for the enjoyment of the 
fullest in life while here. It's those people 
who never allow themselves in spirit to be 
downed, no matter what their individual prob- 



62 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 

lems, surroundings, or conditions may be, but 
who chronically bob up serenely who, after all, 
are the masters of life,, and who are likewise 
the strength-givers and the helpers of others. 
There are multitudes in the world today, there 
are readers of this volume, who could add a 
dozen or a score of years teeming, healthy 
years to their lives by a process of self-exami- 
nation, a mental housecleaning, and a re- 
constructed, positive, commanding type of 
thought. 

Tennyson was prophet when he sang: 

Cleave then to the sunnier side of doubt, 
And cling to Faith beyond the forms of Faith ! 
She reels not in the storm of warring words, 
She brightens at the clash of " Yes " and 

" No," 
She sees the Best that glimmers through the 

Worst, 

She feels the sun is hid but for a night, 
She spies the summer through the winter bud, 
She tastes the fruit before the blossom falls, 
She hears the lark within the songless egg, 
She finds the fountain where they wailed 

" mirage." 



V 



THOUGHT AS A FORCE IN DAILY LIVING 

Some years ago an experience was told to 
me that has been the cause of many interest- 
ing observations since. It was related by a 
man living in one of our noted university 
towns in the Middle West. He was a well- 
known lecture manager, having had charge of 
many lecture tours for John B. Gough, Henry 
Ward Beecher, and others of like standing. 
He himself was a man of splendid character, 
was of a sensitive organism, as we say, and 
had always taken considerable interest in the 
powers and forces pertaining to the inner life. 

As a young man he had left home, and dur- 
ing a portion of his first year away he had 
found employment on a Mississippi steamboat. 
One day in going down the river, while he 
was crossing the deck, a sudden stinging sen- 
sation seized him in the head, and instantly 
vivid thoughts of his mother, back at the old 
home, flashed into his mind. This was fol- 
lowed by a feeling of depression during the 
remainder of the day. The occurrence was so 
63 



64 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 

unusual and the impression of it was so strong 
that he made an account of it in his diary. 

Some time later, on returning home, he was 
met in the yard by his mother. She was wear- 
ing a thin cap on her head which he had never 
seen her wear before. He remarked in regard 
to it. She raised the cap and doing so re- 
vealed the remains of a long ugly gash on the 
side of her head. She then said that some 
months before, naming the time, she had gone 
into the back yard and had picked up a heavy 
crooked stick having a sharp end, to throw 
it out of the way, and in throwing it, it had 
struck a wire clothesline immediately above 
her head and had rebounded with such force 
that it had given her the deep scalp wound 
of which she was speaking. On unpacking his 
bag he looked into his diary and found that 
the time she had mentioned corresponded ex- 
actly with the strange and unusual occurrence 
to himself as they were floating down the 
Mississippi. 

The mother and son were very near one to 
the other, close in their sympathies, and there 
can be but little doubt that the thoughts of 
the mother as she was struck went out, and 
perhaps went strongly out, to her boy who was 
now away from home. He, being sensitively 
organised and intimately related to her in 
thought, and alone at the time, undoubtedly 



HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 65 

got, if not her thought, at least the effects of 
her thought, as it went out to him under these 
peculiar and tense conditions. 

There are scores if not hundreds of occur- 
rences of a more or less similar nature that 
have occurred in the lives of others, many of 
them well authenticated. How many of us, 
even, have had the experience of suddenly 
thinking of a friend of whom we have not 
thought for weeks or months, and then entirely 
unexpectedly meeting or hearing from this 
same friend. How many have had the experi- 
ence of writing a friend, one who has not been 
written to or heard from for a long time, and 
within a day or two getting a letter from that, 
friend the letters " crossing," as we are ac- 
customed to say. There are many other ex- 
periences or facts of a similar nature, and many 
of them exceedingly interesting, that could be 
related did space permit. These all indicate 
to me that thoughts are not mere indefinite 
things but that thoughts are forces, that they 
go out, and that every distinct, clear-cut 
thought has, or may have, an influence of 
some type. 

Thought transference, which is now unques- 
tionably an established fact, notwithstanding 
much chicanery that is still to be found in con- 
nection with it, is undoubtedly to be explained 
through the fact that thoughts are forces. A 



66 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 

positive mind through practice, at first with 
very simple beginnings, gives form to a 
thought that another mind open and receptive 
to it and sufficiently attuned to the other 
mind is able to receive. 

Wireless telegraphy, as a science, has been 
known but a comparatively short time. The 
laws underlying it have been in the universe 
perhaps, or undoubtedly, always. It is only 
lately that the mind of man has been able to 
apprehend them, and has been able to con- 
struct instruments in accordance with these 
laws. We are now able, through a knowledge 
of the laws of vibration and by using the right 
sending and receiving instruments, to send 
actual messages many hundreds of miles di- 
rectly through the ether and without the more 
clumsy accessories of poles and wires. This 
much of it we know there is perhaps even 
more yet to be known. 

We may find, as I am inclined to think we 
shall find, that thought is a form of vibration. 
When a thought is born in the brain, it goes 
out just as a sound wave goes out, and trans- 
mits itself through the ether, making its im- 
pressions upon other minds that are in a suffi- 
ciently sensitive state to receive it; this in 
addition to the effects that various types of 
thoughts have upon the various bodily func- 
tions of the one with whom they take origin. 



HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 67 

We are, by virtue of the laws of evolution, 
constantly apprehending the finer forces of 
nature the tallow-dip, the candle, the oil 
lamp, years later a more refined type of oil, 
gas, electricity, the latest tungsten lights, 
radium and we may be still only at the begin- 
nings. Our finest electric lights of today may 
seem will seem crude and the quality of 
their light even more crude, twenty years 
hence, even less. Many other examples of our 
gradual passing from the coarser to the finer 
in connection with the laws and forces of na- 
ture occur readily to the minds of us all. 

The present great interest on the part of 
thinking men and women everywhere, in addi- 
tion to the more particular studies, experi- 
ments, and observations of men such as Sir 
Oliver Lodge, Sir William Ramsay, and others, 
in the powers and forces pertaining to the 
inner life is an indication that we have reached 
a time when we are making great strides 
along these lines. Some of our greatest scien- 
tists are thinking that we are on the eve of 
some almost startling glimpses into these finer 
realms. My own belief is that we are like- 
wise on the eve of apprehending the more 
precise nature of thought as a force, the 
methods of its workings, and the law under- 
lying its more intimate and everyday uses. 

Of one thing we can rest assured; nothing 



68 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 

in the universe, nothing in connection with 
human life is outside of the Realm of Law. 
The elemental law of Cause and Effect is ab- 
solute in its workings. One of the great laws 
pertaining to human life is: As is the inner, 
so always and inevitably is the outer Cause, 
Effect. Our thoughts and emotions are the 
silent, subtle forces that are constantly exter- 
nalising themselves in kindred forms in our 
outward material world. Like creates like, 
and like attracts like. As is our prevailing 
type of thought, so is our prevailing type and 
our condition of life. 

The type of thought we entertain has its ef- 
fect upon our energies and to a great extent 
upon our bodily conditions and states. Strong, 
clear-cut, positive, hopeful thought has a 
stimulating and life-giving effect upon one's 
outlook, energies, and activities; and upon all 
bodily functions and powers. A falling state 
of the mind induces a chronically gloomy out- 
look and produces inevitably a falling condi- 
tion of the body. The mind grows, moreover, 
into the likeness of the thoughts one most 
habitually entertains and lives with. Every 
thought reproduces of its kind. 

Says an authoritative writer in dealing more 
particularly with the effects of certain types of 
thoughts and emotions upon bodily conditions : 
" Out of our own experience we know that 



HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 69 

anger, fear, worry, hate, revenge, avarice, grief, 
in fact all negative and low emotions, produce 
weakness and disturbance not only in the mind 
but in the body as well. It has been proved 
that they actually generate poisons in the body, 
they depress the circulation; they change the 
quality of the blood, making it less vital ; they 
affect the great nerve centres and thus par- 
tially paralyse the very seat of the bodily ac- 
tivities. On the other hand, faith, hope, love, 
forgiveness, joy, and peace, all such emotions 
are positive and uplifting, and so act on the 
body as to restore and maintain harmony and 
actually to stimulate the circulation and nutri- 
tion." 

The one who does not allow himself to be in- 
fluenced or controlled by fears or forebodings 
is the one who ordinarily does not yield to 
discouragements. He it is who is using the 
positive, success-bringing types of thought that 
are continually working for him for the accom- 
plishment of his ends. The things that he sees 
in the ideal, his strong, positive, and therefore 
creative type of thought, is continually help- 
ing to actualise in the realm of the real. 

We sometimes speak lightly of ideas, but this 
world would be indeed a sorry place in which 
to live were it not for ideas and were it not 
for ideals. Every piece of mechanism that has 
ever been built, if we trace back far enough, 



70 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 

was first merely an idea in some man's or / 
woman's mind. Every structure or edifice that 
has ever been reared had form first in this 
same immaterial realm. So every great under- 
taking of whatever nature had its inception, its 
origin, in the realm of the immaterial at least 
as we at present call it before it was em- 
bodied and stood forth in material form. 

It is well, then, that we have our ideas and 
our ideals. It is well, even, to build castles in 
the air, if we follow these up and give them 
material clothing or structure, so that they 
become castles on the ground. Occasionally it 
is true that these may shrink or, rather, may 
change their form and become cabins; but 
many times we find that an expanded vision 
and an expanded experience lead us to a knowl- 
edge of the fact that, so far as happiness and 
satisfaction are concerned, the contents of a 
cabin may outweigh many times those of the 
castle. 

Successful men and women are almost in- 
variably those possessing to a supreme degree 
the element of faith. Faith, absolute, uncon- 
querable faith, is one of the essential con- 
comitants, therefore one of the great secrets of 
success. We must realise, and especially valu- 
able is it for young men and women to realise, 
that one carries his success or his failure with 
him, that it does not depend upon outside 



HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 71 

conditions. There are some that no circum- 
stances or combinations of circumstances can 
thwart or keep down. Let circumstance seem 
to thwart or circumvent them in one direction, 
and almost instantly they are going forward 
along another direction. Circumstance is kept 
busy keeping up with them. When she meets 
such, after a few trials, she apparently de- 
cides to give up and turn her attention to those 
of the less positive, the less forceful, therefore 
the less determined, types of mind and of life. 
Circumstance has received some hard knocks 
from men and women of this type. She has 
grown naturally timid and will always back 
down whenever she recognises a mind, and 
therefore a life, of sufficient force. 

To make the best of whatever present con- 
ditions are, to form and clearly to see one's 
ideal, though it may seem far distant and al- 
most impossible, to believe in it, and to believe 
in one's ability to actualise it this is the first 
essential. Not, then, to sit and idly fold the 
hands, expecting it to actualise itself, but to 
take hold of the first thing that offers itself 
to do, that lies sufficiently along the way, to 
do this faithfully, believing, knowing, that it 
is but the step that will lead to the next best 
thing, and this to the next; this is the second 
and the completing stage of all accomplish- 
ment. 



72 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 

We speak of fate many times as if it were 
something foreign to or outside of ourselves, 
forgetting that fate awaits always our own 
conditions. A man decides his own fate 
through the types of thoughts he entertains 
and gives a dominating influence in his life. 
He sits at the helm of his thought world and, 
guiding, decides his own fate, or, through nega- 
tive, vacillating, and therefore weakening 
thought, he drifts, and fate decides him. Fate 
is not something that takes form and domi- 
nates us irrespective of any say on our own 
part. Through a knowledge and an intelli- 
gent and determined use of the silent but ever- 
working power of thought we either condition 
circumstances, or, lacking this knowledge or 
failing to apply it, we accept the role of a 
conditioned circumstance. It is a help some- 
times to realise and to voice with Henley: 

Out of the night that covers me, 

Black as the pit from pole to pole, 
I thank whatever gods may be 
For my unconquerable soul. 

The thoughts that we entertain not only de- 
termine the conditions of our own immediate 
lives, but they influence, perhaps in a much 
more subtle manner than most of us realise, 
our relations with and our influence upon those 



HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 73 

with whom we associate or even come into 
contact. All are influenced, even though un- 
consciously, by them. 

Thoughts of good will, sympathy, magna- 
nimity, good cheer in brief, all thoughts 
emanating from a spirit of love are felt in 
their positive, warming, and stimulating influ- 
ences by others ; they inspire in turn the same 
types of thoughts and feelings in them, and 
they come back to us laden with their en- 
nobling, stimulating, pleasure-bringing influ- 
ences. 

Thoughts of envy, or malice, or hatred, or ill 
will are likewise felt by others. They are in- 
fluenced adversely by them. They inspire 
either the same types of thoughts and emotions 
in them; or they produce in them a certain 
type of antagonistic feeling that has the tend- 
ency to neutralise and, if continued for a 
sufficient length of time, deaden sympathy and 
thereby all friendly relations. 

We have heard much of " personal mag- 
netism." Careful analysis will, I think, reveal 
the fact that the one who has to any marked 
degree the element of personal magnetism is 
one of the large-hearted, magnanimous, cheer- 
bringing, unself-centred types, whose positive 
thought forces are being continually felt by 
others, and are continually inspiring and call- 
ing forth from others these same splendid at- 



74 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 

tributes. I have yet to find any one, man or 
woman, of the opposite habits and, therefore, 
trend of mind and heart who has had or who 
has even to the slightest perceptible degree the 
quality that we ordinarily think of when we 
use the term " personal magnetism." 

If one would have friends he or she must be 
a friend, must radiate habitually friendly, help- 
ful thoughts, good will, love. The one who 
doesn't cultivate the hopeful, cheerful, uncom- 
plaining, good-will attitude toward life and 
toward others becomes a drag, making life 
harder for others as well as for one's self. 

Ordinarily we find in people the qualities we 
are mostly looking for, or the qualities that 
our own prevailing characteristics call forth. 
The larger the nature, the less critical and 
cynical it is, the more it is given to looking for 
the best and the highest in others, and the less, 
therefore, is it given to gossip. 

It was Jeremy Bentham who said : " In order 
to love mankind, we must not expect too much 
of them." And Goethe had a still deeper 
vision when he said : " Who is the happiest 
of men? He who values the merits of others, 
and in their pleasure takes joy, even as though 
it were his own." 

The chief characteristic of the gossip is that 
he or she prefers to live in the low-lying 
miasmic strata of life, revelling in the nega- 



HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 75 

tives of life and taking joy in finding and ped- 
dling about the findings that he or she natu- 
rally makes there. The larger natures see the 
good and sympathise with the weaknesses and 
the frailties of others. They realise also that it 
is so consummately inconsistent many times 
even humorously inconsistent for one also 
with weaknesses, frailties, and faults, though 
perhaps of a little different character, to sit 
in judgment of another. Gossip concerning 
the errors or shortcomings of another is judg- 
ing another. The one who is himself perfect is 
the one who has the right to judge another. 
By a strange law, however, though by a natural 
law, we find, as we understand life in its funda- 
mentals better, such a person is seldom if ever 
given to judging, much less to gossip. 

Life becomes rich and expansive through 
sympathy, good will, and good cheer; not 
through cynicism or criticism. That splendid 
little poem of but a single stanza by Edwin 
Markham, " Outwitted," points after all to one 
of life's fundamentals: 

He drew a circle that shut me out 
Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout, 
But Love and I had the wit to win : 
We drew a circle that took him in! 



VI 



JESUS THE SUPREME EXPONENT OF THE 

INNER FORCES AND POWERS: HIS 

PEOPLE'S RELIGION AND THEIR 

CONDITION 

In order to have any true or adequate under- 
standing of what the real revelation and teach- 
ings of Jesus were, two things must be borne 
in mind. It is necessary in the first place, 
not only to have a knowledge of, but always 
to bear in mind the method, the medium 
through which the account of his life has come 
down to us. Again, before the real content 
and significance of Jesus' revelation and teach- 
ings can be intelligently understood, it is nec- 
essary that we have a knowledge of the con- 
ditions of the time in which he lived and of 
the people to whom he spoke, to whom his 
revelation was made. 

To any one who has even a rudimentary 
knowledge of the former, it becomes apparent 
at once that no single saying or statement of 
Jesus can be taken to indicate either his rev- 
elation or his purpose. These must be made 
to depend upon not any single statement or 
76 



HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 77 

saying of his own, much less anything re- 
ported about him by another; but it must be 
made to depend rather upon the whole tenor 
of his teachings. 

Jesus put nothing in writing. There was 
no one immediately at hand to make a record 
of any of his teachings or any of his acts. 
It is now well known that no one of the gos- 
pels was written by an immediate hearer, by 
an eye-witness. 

The Gospel of Mark, the oldest gospel, or 
in other words the one written nearest to 
Jesus' time, was written some forty years 
after he had finished his work. Matthew and 
Luke, taken to a great extent from the Gospel 
of Mark, supplemented by one or two addi- 
tional sources, were written many years after. 
The Gospel of John was not written until after 
the beginning of the second century after 
Christ. These four sets of chronicles, called 
the Gospels, written independently one of 
another, were then collected many years after 
their authors were dead, and still a great deal 
later were brought together into a single book. 

The following concise statement by Pro- 
fessor Henry Drummond throws much light 
upon the way the New Testament portions of 
our Bible took form : " The Bible is not a 
book; it is a library. It consists of sixty-six 
books. It is a great convenience, but in some 



78 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 

respects a great misfortune, that these books 
have always been bound up together and given 
out as one book to the world, when they are 
not; because that has led to endless mistakes 
in theology and practical life. These books, 
which make up this library, written at inter- 
vals of hundreds of years, were collected after 
the last of the writers was dead long after 
by human hands. Where were the books? 
Take the New Testament. There were four 
lives of Christ. One was in Rome; one was 
in Southern Italy; one was in Palestine; one 
in Asia Minor. There were twenty-one letters. 
Five were in Greece and Macedonia; five in 
Asia; one in Rome. The rest were in the 
pockets of private individuals. Theophilus 
had Acts. They were collected undesignedly. 
In the third century the New Testament con- 
sisted of the following books: The four Gos- 
pels, Acts, thirteen letters of Paul, I John, I 
Peter; and, in addition, the Epistles of Bar- 
nabas and Hennas. This was not called the 
New Testament, but the Christian Library. 
Then these last books were discarded. They 
ceased to be regarded as upon the same level 
as the others. In the fourth century the canon 
was closed that is to say, a list was made up 
of the books which were to be regarded as 
canonical. And then long after that they 
were stitched together and made up into one 



HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 79 

book hundreds of years after that. Who made 
up the complete list? It was never formally 
made up. The bishops of the different 
churches would draw up a list each of the books 
that they thought ought to be put into this 
Testament. The churches also would give 
their opinions. Sometimes councils would 
meet and talk it over discuss it. Scholars 
like Jerome would investigate the authenticity 
of the different documents, and there came to 
be a general consensus of the churches on the 
matter." 

Jesus spoke in his own native language, the 
Aramaic. His sayings were then rendered 
into Greek, and, as is well known by all well- 
versed Biblical scholars, it was not an espe- 
cially high order of Greek. The New Testa- 
ment scriptures including the four gospels, 
were then many hundreds of years afterwards 
translated from the Greek into our modern 
languages English, German, French, Swed- 
ish, or whatever the language of the particu- 
lar translation may be. Those who know 
anything of the matter of translation know 
how difficult it is to render the exact meanings 
of any statements or writing into another lan- 
guage. The rendering of a single word may 
sometimes mean, or rather may make a great 
difference in the thought of the one giving 
the utterance. How much greater is this lia- 



8o HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 

bility when the thing thus rendered is twice 
removed from its original source and form! 

The original manuscripts had no punctua- 
tion and no verse divisions; these were all 
arbitrarily supplied by the translators later on. 
It is also a well-established fact on the part 
of leading Biblical scholars that through the 
centuries there have been various interpola- 
tions in the New Testament scriptures, both 
by way of omissions and additions. 

Reference is made to these various facts in 
connection with the sayings and the teachings 
of Jesus and the methods and the media 
through which they have come down to us, 
to show how impossible it would be to base 
Jesus' revelation or purpose upon any single 
utterance made or purported to be made by 
him to indicate, in other words, that to get 
at his real message, his real teachings, and his 
real purpose, we must find the binding thread 
if possible, the reiterated statement, the re- 
peated purpose that makes them throb with 
the living element. 

Again, no intelligent understanding of Jesus' 
revelation or ministry can be had without a 
knowledge of the conditions of the time, and 
of the people to whom his revelation was 
made, among whom he lived and worked; for 
his ministry had in connection with it both a 
time element and an eternal element. There 



HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 81 

are two things that must be noted, the moral 
and religious condition of the people; and, 
again, their economic and political status. 

The Jewish people had been preeminently 
a religious people. But a great change had 
taken place. Religion was at its lowest ebb. 
Its spirit was well-nigh dead, and in its place 
there had gradually come into being a Phara- 
saic legalism a religion of form, ceremony. 
An extensive system of ecclesiastical tradition, 
ecclesiastical law and observances, which had 
gradually robbed the people of all their former 
spirit of religion, had been gradually built up 
by those in ecclesiastical authority. 

The voice of that illustrious line of Hebrew 
prophets had ceased to speak. It was close to 
two hundred years since the voice of a living 
prophet had been heard. Tradition had taken 
its place. It took the form: Moses hath said; 
It has been said of old ; The prophet hath said. 
The scribe was the keeper of the ecclesiastical 
law. The lawyer was its interpreter. 

The Pharisees had gradually elevated them- 
selves into an ecclesiastical hierarchy who were 
the custodians of the law and religion. They 
had come to regard themselves as especially 
favoured, a privileged class not only the cus- 
todians but the dispensers of all religious 
knowledge and therefore of religion. The 
people, in their estimation, were of a lower in- 



82 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 

tellectual and religious order, possessing no 
capabilities in connection with religion or 
morals, dependent therefore upon their su- 
periors in these matters. 

This state of affairs that had gradually come 
about was productive of two noticeable results : 
a religious starvation and stagnation on the 
part of the great mass of the people on the 
one hand, and the creation of a haughty, self- 
righteous and domineering ecclesiastical 
hierarchy on the other. In order for a clear 
understanding of some of Jesus' sayings and 
teachings, some of which constitute a very 
vital part of his ministry, it is necessary to 
understand clearly what this condition was. 

Another important fact that sheds much 
light upon the nature of the ministry of Jesus 
is to be found, as has already been intimated, 
in the political and the economic condition of 
the people of the time. The Jewish nation 
had been subjugated and were under the domi- 
nation of Rome. Rome in connection with 
Israel, as in connection with all conquered 
peoples, was a hard master. Taxes and trib- 
ute, tribute and taxes, could almost be said to 
be descriptive of her administration of affairs. 

She was already in her degenerate stage. 
Never perhaps in the history of the world 
had men been so ruled by selfishness, greed, 
military power and domination, and the pomp 



HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 83 

and display of material wealth. Luxury, in- 
dulgence, over-indulgence, vice. The inevi- 
table concomitant followed a continually in- 
creasing moral and physical degeneration. 
An increasing luxury and indulgence called 
for an increasing means to satisfy them. Mes- 
sengers were sent and additional tribute was 
levied. Pontius Pilate was the Roman ad- 
ministrative head or governor in Judea at the 
time. Tiberius Caesar was the Roman Em- 
peror. 

Rome at this time consisted of a few thou- 
sand nobles and people of station freemen 
and hundreds of thousands of slaves. Even 
her campaigns in time became virtual raids 
for plunder. She conquered and she plun- 
dered those whom she conquered. Great num- 
bers from among the conquered peoples were 
regularly taken to Rome and sold into slavery. 
Judea had not escaped this. Thousands of 
her best people had been transported to Rome 
and sold into slavery. It was never known 
where the blow would fall next; what homes 
would be desolated and both sons and daugh- 
ters sent away into slavery. No section, no 
family could feel any sense of security. A 
feeling of fear, a sense of desolation pervaded 
everywhere. 

There was a tradition, which had grown 
into a well-defined belief, that a Deliverer 



84 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 

would be sent them, that they would be de- 
livered out of the hands of their enemies and 
that their oppressors would in turn be brought 
to grief. There was also in the section round 
about Judaea a belief, which had grown until 
it had become well-nigh universal, that the 
end of the world, or the end of the age, was 
speedily coming, that then tnere would be an 
end of all earthly government and that the 
reign of Jehovah the kingdom of God would 
be established. These two beliefs went hand 
in hand. They were kept continually before 
the people, and now and then received a fresh 
impetus by the appearance of a new prophet 
or a new teacher, whom the people went 
gladly out to hear. Of this kind was John, 
the son of a priest, later called John the 
Baptist. 

After his period of preparation, he came out 
of the wilderness of Judaea, and in the region 
about the Jordan with great power and per- 
suasiveness, according to the accounts, he 
gave utterance to the message: Repent ye, 
for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand. For- 
sake all earthly things; they will be of avail 
but a very short time now, turn ye from them 
and prepare yourselves for the coming of the 
Kingdom of God. The old things will speedily 
pass away ; all things will become new. Many 
went out to hear him and were powerfully 



HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 85 

appealed to by the earnest, rugged utterances 
of this new preacher of righteousness and re- 
pentance. 

His name and his message spread through 
all the land of Judea and the country around 
the Jordan. Many were baptised by him 
there, he making use of this symbolic service 
which had been long in use by certain branches 
of the Jewish people, especially the order of 
the Essenes. 

Among those who went out to hear John 
and who accepted baptism at his hands was 
Jesus, the son of Joseph and Mary, whose 
home was at Nazareth. It marks also the be- 
ginning of his own public ministry, for which 
he evidently had been in preparation for a 
considerable time. 

It seems strange that we know so little of 
the early life of one destined to exert such a 
powerful influence upon the thought and the 
life of the world. In the gospel of Mark, 
probably the most reliable, because the near- 
est to his time, there is no mention whatever 
of his early life. The first account is where 
he appears at John's meetings. Almost im- 
mediately thereafter begins his own public 
ministry. 

In the gospel of Luke we have a very 
meagre account of him. It is at the age of 
twelve. The brief account gives us a glimpse 



86 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 

into the lives of his father and his mother, 
Joseph and Mary; showing that at that time 
they were not looked upon as in any way 
different from all of the inhabitants of their 
little community, Nazareth, the little town in 
Galilee having a family of several sons and 
daughters, and that Jesus, the eldest of the 
family, grew in stature and in knowledge, as 
all the neighbouring children grew; but that 
he, even at an early age, showed that he had 
a wonderful aptitude for the things of the 
spirit. I reproduce Luke's brief account here : 
" Now, his parents went to Jerusalem every 
year at the feast of the passover. And when 
he was twelve years old, they went up to 
Jerusalem, after the custom of the feast. And 
when they had fulfilled the days, as they re- 
turned, the child Jesus tarried behind in Jeru- 
salem: and Joseph and his mother knew not 
of it. But they, supposing him to have been 
in the company, went a day's journey; and 
they sought him among their kinsfolk and 
acquaintances. And when they found him 
not, they turned back again to Jerusalem, 
seeking him. And it came to pass that after 
three days they found him in the temple, sit- 
ting in the midst of the doctors, both hearing 
them and asking them questions. And all 
that heard him were astonished at his under- 
standing and answers. 



HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 87 

" And when they saw him they were 
amazed: and his mother said unto him, Son, 
why hast thou thus dealt with us? Behold, 
thy father and I have sought thee sorrowing. 
And he said unto them, How is it that ye 
sought me? Wist ye not that I must be about 
my father's business? And they understood 
not the saying which he spake unto them. 
And he went down with them, and came to 
Nazareth, and was subject unto them: but his 
mother kept all these sayings in her heart. 
And Jesus increased in wisdom and stature, 
and in favour with God and man." 

Nothing could be more interesting than to 
know the early life of Jesus. There are 
various theories as to how this was spent, that 
is, as to what his preparation was the facts 
of his life, in addition to his working with his 
father at his trade, that of a carpenter ; but we 
know nothing that has the stamp of historical 
accuracy upon it. Of his entire life, indeed, 
including the period of his active ministry, 
from thirty to nearly thirty-three, it is but fair 
to presume that we have at best but a frag- 
mentary account in the Gospel narratives. It 
is probable that many things connected with 
his ministry, and many of his sayings and 
teachings, we have no record of at all. 

It is probable that in connection with his 
preparation he spent a great deal of time 



88 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 

alone, in the quiet, in communion with his 
Divine Source, or as the term came so nat- 
urally to him, with God, his Father God, our 
Father, for that was his teaching my God 
and your God. The many times that we are 
told in the narratives that he went to the 
mountain alone, would seem to justify us in 
this conclusion. Anyway, it would be abso- 
lutely impossible for anyone to have such a 
vivid realisation of his essential oneness with 
the Divine, without much time spent in such a 
manner that the real life could evolve into its 
Divine likeness, and then mould the outer life 
according to this ideal or pattern. 



VII 



THE DIVINE RULE IN THE MIND AND 

HEART: THE UNESSENTIALS WE DROP 

THE SPIRIT ABIDES 

That Jesus had a supreme aptitude for the 
things of the spirit, there can be no question. 
That through desire and through will he fol- 
lowed the leadings of the spirit that he 
gave himself completely to its leadings 
is evident both from his utterances and his 
life. It was this combination undoubtedly 
that led him into that vivid sense of his life 
in God, which became so complete that he 
afterwards speaks I and my Father are one. 
That he was always, however, far from iden- 
tifying himself as equal with God is indicated 
by his constant declaration of his dependence 
upon God. Again and again we have these 
declarations : " My meat and drink is to do 
the will of God." " My doctrine is not mine, 
but his that sent me." " I can of myself do 
nothing: as I hear I judge; and my judgment 
is righteous; because I seek not mine own 
will, but the will of him that sent me." 

And even the very last acts and words of 
89 



go HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 

his life proclaim this constant sense of de- 
pendence for guidance, for strength, and even 
for succour. With all his Divine self-realisa- 
tion there was always, moreover, that sense 
of humility that is always a predominating 
characteristic of the really great. " Why call- 
est thou me good? There is none good but 
one that is God." 

It is not at all strange, therefore, that the 
very first utterance of his public ministry, 
according to the chronicler Mark was: The 
Kingdom of God is at hand: repent ye, and 
believe the gospel. And while this was the 
beginning utterance, it was the keynote that 
ran through his entire ministry. It is the 
basic fact of all his teachings. The realisation 
of his own life he sought to make the realisa- 
tion of all others. It was, it is, a call to right- 
eousness, and a call to righteousness through 
the only channel that any such call can be 
effective through a realisation of the essen- 
tial righteousness and goodness of the human 
soul. 

An unbiased study of Jesus' own words will 
reveal the fact that he taught only what he 
himself had first realised. It is this, moreover, 
that makes him the supreme teacher of all 
time Counsellor, Friend, Saviour. It is the 
saving of men from their lower conceptions 
and selves, a lifting of them up to their higher 



HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 91 

selves, which, as he taught, is eternally one 
with God, the Father, and which, when real- 
ised, will inevitably, reflexly, one might say, 
lift a man's thoughts, acts, conduct the en- 
tire life up to that standard or pattern. It 
is thus that the Divine ideal, that the Christ 
becomes enthroned within. The Christ-con- 
sciousness is the universal Divine nature in 
us. It is the state of God-consciousness. It 
is the recognition of the indwelling Divine life 
as the source, and therefore the essence of our 
own lives. 

Jesus came as the revealer of a new truth, 
a new conception of man. Indeed, the Mes- 
siah. He came as the revealer of the only 
truth that could lead his people out of their 
trials and troubles out of their bondage. 
They were looking for their Deliverer to come 
in the person of a worldly king and to set up 
his rule as such. He came in the person of a 
humble teacher, the revealer of a mighty truth, 
the revealer of the Way, the only way 
whereby real freedom and deliverance can 
come. For those who would receive him, he 
was indeed the Messiah. For those who 
would not, he was not, and the same holds 
today. 

He came as the revealer of a truth which 
had been glimpsed by many inspired teachers 
among the Jewish race and among those of 



2 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 

other races. The time waited, however, for 
one to come who would first embody this 
truth and then be able effectively to teach it. 
This was done in a supreme degree by the 
Judaean Teacher. He came not as the doer- 
away with the Law and the Prophets, but 
rather to regain and then to supplement them. 
Such was his own statement. 

It is time to ascend another round. I reveal 
God to you, not in the Tabernacle, but in the 
human heart then in the Tabernacle in the 
degree that He is in the hearts of those who 
frequent the Tabernacle. Otherwise the Tab- 
ernacle becomes a whited sepulchre. The 
Church is not a building, an organisation, not 
a creed. The Church is the Spirit of Truth. 
It must have one supreme object and purpose 
to lead men to the truth. I reveal what I 
have found I in the Father and the Father 
in me. I seek not to do mine own will, but 
the will of the Father who sent me. 

Everything was subordinated to this Divine 
realisation and to his Divine purpose. 

The great purpose at which he laboured so 
incessantly was the teaching of the realisation 
of the Divine will in the hearts and minds, 
and through these in the lives of men the 
finding and the realisation of the Kingdom of 
God. This is the supreme fact of life. Get 
right at the centre and the circumference will 



HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 93 

then care for itself. As is the inner, so always 
and invariably will be the outer. There is an 
inner guide that regulates the life when this 
inner guide is allowed to assume authority. 
Why be disconcerted, why in a heat concern- 
ing so many things? It is not the natural and 
the normal life. Life at its best is something 
infinitely beyond this. " Seek ye first the 
Kingdom of God and His righteousness, and 
all these things shall be added unto you." 
And if there is any doubt in regard to his real 
meaning in this here is his answer : " Neither 
shall they say, ' Lo here ' or ' Lo there ' for 
behold the Kingdom of God is within you." 

Again and again this is his call. Again and 
again this is his revelation. In the first three 
gospels alone he uses the expression " the 
Kingdom of God," or "the Kingdom of 
Heaven," upwards of thirty times. Any pos- 
sible reference to any organisation that he 
might have had in mind, can be found in the 
entire four gospels but twice. 

It would almost seem that it would not be 
difficult to judge as to what was uppermost in 
his mind. I have made this revelation to you ; 
you must raise yourselves, you must become 
in reality what in essence you really are. I in 
the Father, and the Father in me. I reveal 
only what I myself know. As I am, ye shall 
be. God is your Father. In your real nature 



94 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 

you are Divine. Drop your ideas of the de- 
pravity of the human soul. To believe it de- 
praves. To teach it depraves the one who 
teaches it, and the one who accepts it. Follow 
not the traditions of men. I reveal to you 
your Divine Birthright. Accept it. It is best. 
Behold all things are become new. The King- 
dom of God is the one all-inclusive thing. 
Find it and all else will follow. 

" Whereunto shall we liken the kingdom of 
God? Or with what comparison shall we 
compare it? It is like a grain of mustard seed, 
which, when it is sown in the earth, is less 
than all the seeds that be in the earth; but 
when it is sown, it groweth up, and becometh 
greater than all herbs, and shooteth out great 
branches; so that the fowls of the air may 
lodge under the shadow of it." "Whereunto 
shall I liken the kingdom of God? Is it like 
leaven, which a woman took and hid in three 
measures of meal, till the whole was leav- 
ened?" Seek ye first the Kingdom, and the 
Holy Spirit, the channel of communion be- 
tween God your source, and yourselves, will 
lead you, and will lead you into all truth. It 
will become as a lamp to your feet, a guide 
that is always reliable. 

To refuse allegiance to the Holy Spirit, the 
Spirit of Truth, is the real sin, the only sin 
that cannot be forgiven. Violation of all 



HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 95 

moral and natural law may be forgiven. It 
will bring its penalty, for the violation of law 
carries in itself its own penalty, its own pun- 
ishment it is a part of law; but cease the 
violation and the penalty ceases. The vio- 
lation registers its ill effects in the illness, 
the sickness, of body and spirit. If the 
violation has been long continued, these 
effects may remain for some time; but the 
instant the violation ceases the repair will be- 
gin, and things will go the other way. 

Learn from this experience, however, that 
there can be no deliberate violation of, or 
blaspheming against any moral or natural law. 
But deliberately to refuse obedience to the 
inner guide, the Holy Spirit, constitutes a de- 
fiance that eventually puts out the lamp of 
life, and that can result only in confusion and 
darkness. It severs the ordained relationship, 
the connecting, the binding cord, between the 
soul the self and its Source. Stagnation, 
degeneracy, and eventual death is merely the 
natural sequence. 

With this Divine self-realisation the Spirit 
assumes control and mastery, and you are 
saved from the follies of error, and from the 
consequences of error. Repent ye turn from 
your trespasses and sins, from your lower 
conceptions of life, of pleasure and of pain, 
and walk in this way. The lower propensities 



g6 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 

and desires will lose their hold and will in time 
fall away. You will be at first surprised, and 
then dumfounded, at what you formerly took 
for pleasure. True pleasure and satisfaction 
go hand in hand, nor are there any bad after 
results. 

All genuine pleasures should lead to more 
perfect health, a greater accretion of power, a 
continually expanding sense of life and service. 
When God is uppermost in the heart, when 
the Divine rule under the direction of the 
Holy Spirit becomes the ruling power in the 
life of the individual, then the body and its 
senses are subordinated to this rule; the pas- 
sions become functions to be used ; license and 
perverted use give way to moderation and 
wise use ; and there are then no penalties that 
outraged law exacts; satiety gives place to 
satisfaction. It was Edward Carpenter who 
said : " In order to enjoy life one must be a 
master of life for to be a slave to its incon- 
sistencies can only mean torment ; and in order 
to enjoy the senses one must be master of 
them. To dominate the actual world you 
must, like Archimedes, base your fulcrum 
somewhere beyond." 

It is not the use, but the abuse of anything 
good in itself that brings satiety, disease, suf- 
fering, dissatisfaction. Nor is asceticism a 
true road of life. All things are for use; but 



HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 97 

all must be wisely, in most cases, moderately 
used, for true enjoyment. All functions and 
powers are for use; but all must be brought 
under the domination of the Spirit the God- 
illumined spirit. This is the road that leads 
to heaven here and heaven hereafter and we 
can rest assured that we will never find a 
heaven hereafter that we do not make while 
here. Through everything runs this teaching 
of the Master. 

How wonderfully and how masterfully and 
simply he sets forth h'is whole teaching of sin 
and the sinner and his relation to the Father in 
that marvellous parable, the Parable of the 
Prodigal Son. To bring it clearly to mind 
again it runs: 

" A certain man had two sons : and the 
younger of them said to his father, Father, 
give me the portion of goods that falleth to 
me. And he divided unto them his living. 
And not many days after the younger son 
gathered all together, and took his journey to 
a far country, and there wasted his substance 
with riotous living. And when he had spent 
all, there arose a mighty famine in that land; 
and he began to be in want. And he went and 
joined himself to a citizen of that country ; and 
he sent him into his fields to feed swine. And 
he would fain have filled his belly with the 
husks that the swine did eat : and no man gave 



g8 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 

unto him. And when he came to himself, he 
said, How many hired servants of my father's 
have bread enough and to spare, and I perish 
with hunger ! I will arise and go to my father, 
and will say unto him, Father, I have sinned 
against heaven, and before thee, and am no 
more worthy to be called thy son: make me 
as one of thy hired servants. And he arose 
and came to his father. 

" But when he was yet a great way off, his 
father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, 
and fell upon his neck, and kissed him. And 
the son said unto him, Father, I have sinned 
against heaven, and in thy sight, and am no 
more worthy to be called thy son. But the 
father said to his servants, Bring forth the best 
robe and put it on him ; and put a ring on his 
hand, and shoes on his feet: and bring hither 
the fatted calf, and kill it; and let us eat, and 
be merry; for this my son was dead, and is 
alive again; he was lost, and is found. And 
they began to be merry. Now his elder son 
was in the field: and as he came and drew 
nigh to the house, he heard music and dancing. 
And he called one of the servants, and asked 
what these things meant. And he said unto 
him, Thy brother is come ; and thy father hath 
killed the fatted calf, because he hath received 
him safe and sound. And he was angry and 
would not go in: therefore came his father 



HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 99 

out, and entreated him, and he answering said 
to his father, Lo, these many years do I serve 
thee, neither transgressed I at any time thy 
commandment; and yet thou never gavest me 
a kid, that I might make merry with my 
friends : but as soon as this thy son was come, 
which hath devoured thy living with harlots, 
thou hast killed for him the fatted calf. And 
he said unto him, Son, thou art ever with me, 
and all that I have is thine. It was meet that 
we should make merry, and be glad: for this 
thy brother was dead, and is alive again; and 
was lost, and is found." 

It does away forever in all thinking minds 
with any participation of Jesus in that per- 
verted and perverting doctrine that man is by 
nature essentially depraved, degraded, fallen, 
in the sense as was given to the world long, 
long after his time in the doctrine of the Fall 
of Man, and the need of redemption through 
some external source outside of himself, in 
distinction from the truth that he revealed 
that was to make men free the truth of their 
Divine nature, and this love of man by the 
Heavenly Father, and the love of the Heavenly 
Father by His children. 

To connect Jesus with any such thought or 
teaching would be to take the heart out of 
his supreme revelation. For his whole con- 
ception of God the Father, given in all his 



ioo HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 

utterances, was that of a Heavenly Father of 
love, of care, longing to exercise His protect- 
ing care and to give good gifts to His children 
and this because it is the essential nature 
of God to be fatherly. His Fatherhood is not, 
therefore, accidental, not dependent upon any 
conditions or circumstances; it is essential. 

If it is the nature of a father to give good 
gifts to his children, so in a still greater de- 
gree is it the nature of the Heavenly Father 
to give good gifts to those who ask Him. As 
His words are recorded by Matthew : " Or 
what man is there of you, whom if his son ask 
bread, will he give him a stone? Or if he 
ask a fish, will he give him a serpent? If ye 
then, being evil, know how to give good gifts 
unto your children, how much more shall your 
Father which is in heaven give good things to 
them that ask him? " So in the parable as 
presented by Jesus, the father's love was such 
that as soon as it was made known to him 
that his son who had been lost to him had 
returned, he went out to meet him ; he granted 
him full pardon and there were no condi- 
tions. 

Speaking of the fundamental teaching of 
the Master, and also in connection with this 
same parable, another has said : " It thus ap- 
pears from this story, as elsewhere in the 
teaching of Jesus, that he did not call God our 



HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 101 

father because He created us, or because He 
rules over us, or because He made a covenant 
with Abraham, but simply and only because He 
loves us. This parable individualises the divine 
love, as did also the missionary activity of 
Jesus. The gospels know nothing of a na- 
tional fatherhood, of a God whose love is con- 
fined to a particular people. It is the indi- 
vidual man who has a heavenly Father, and 
this individualised fatherhood is the only one 
of which Jesus speaks. As he had realised his 
own moral and spiritual life in the conscious- 
ness that God was his father, so he sought 
to give life to the world by a living revelation 
of the truth that God loves each separate soul. 
This is a prime factor in the religion and ethics 
of Jesus. It is seldom or vaguely apprehended 
in the Old Testament teaching; but in the 
teaching of Jesus it is central and normative." 
Again in the two allied parables of Jesus the 
Parable of the Lost Sheep, and the Parable of 
the Lost Coin it is his purpose to teach the 
great love of the Father for all, including those 
lost in their trespasses and sins, and His re- 
joicing in their return. 

This leads to Jesus' conception and teaching 
of sin and repentance. Although God is the 
Father, He demands filial obedience in the 
hearts and the minds of His children. Men 
by following the devices and desires of their 



102 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 

own hearts, are not true to their real nature, 
their Divine pattern. By following their self- 
ish desires they have brought sin, and thereby 
suffering, on themselves and others. The un- 
clean, the selfish desires of mind and heart, 
keep them from their higher moral and spirit- 
ual ideal although not necessarily giving 
themselves to gross sin. Therefore, they must 
become sons of God by repenting by turning 
from the evil inclinations of their hearts and 
seeking to follow the higher inclinations of 
the heart as becomes children of God and those 
who are dwellers in the Heavenly Kingdom. 
Therefore, his opening utterance : " The time 
is fulfilled, and the Kingdom of God is at hand ; 
repent ye, and believe the gospel." 

Love of God with the whole heart, and love 
of the neighbour, leading to the higher peace 
and fulfilment, must take the place of these 
more selfish desires that lead to antagonisms 
and dissatisfactions both within and without. 
All men are to pray : Forgive us our sins. All 
men are to repent of their sins which are the 
results of following their own selfish desires, 
those of the body, or their own selfish desires 
to the detriment of the welfare of the 
neighbour. 

All men are to seek the Divine rule, the rule 
of God in the heart, and thereby have the 
guidance of the Holy Spirit, which is the 



HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 103 

Divine spirit of wisdom that tabernacles with 
man when through desire and through will he 
makes the conditions whereby it can make its 
abode with him. It is a manifestation of the 
force that is above man it is the eternal herit- 
age of the soul. " Now the Lord is the Spirit 
and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is 
liberty." And therein lies salvation. It fol- 
lows the seeking and the finding of the King- 
dom of God and His righteousness that Jesus 
revealed to a waiting world. 

And so it was the spirit of religion that 
Jesus came to reveal the real Fatherhood of 
God and the Divine Sonship of man. A better 
righteousness than that of the scribes and the 
Pharisees not a slavish adherence to the 
Law, with its supposed profits and rewards. 
Get the motive of life right. Get the heart 
right and these things become of secondary 
importance. As his supreme revelation was 
the personal fatherhood of God, from which 
follows necessarily the Divine sonship of man, 
so there was a corollary to it, a portion of it 
almost as essential as the main truth itself 
namely, that all men are brothers. Not merely 
those of one little group, or tribe or nation; 
not merely those of any one little set or re- 
ligion; not merely those of this or that little 
compartment that we build and arbitrarily 
separate ourselves into but all men the world 



io 4 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 

over. If this is not true then Jesus' supreme 
revelation is false. 

In connection with this great truth he 
brought a new standard by virtue of the logic 
of his revelation. " Ye have heard that it hath 
been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and 
hate thine enemy. But I say unto you, Love 
your enemies, bless them that curse you, do 
good to them that hate you, and pray for them 
which despitefully use you, and persecute you ; 
that ye may be the children of your Father 
which is in heaven." Struggling for recogni- 
tion all through the Old Testament scriptures, 
and breaking through partially at least in 
places, was this conception which is at the 
very basis of all man's relationship with man. 

And finally through this supreme Master of 
life it did break through, with a wonderful 
newborn consciousness. 

The old dispensation, with its legal formal- 
ism, was an eye for an eye and a tooth for a 
tooth. The new dispensation was " But I 
say unto you, Love your enemies." Enmity 
begets enmity. It is as senseless as it is god- 
less. It runs through all his teachings 'and 
through every act of his life. If fundamen- 
tally you do not have the love of your fellow- 
man in your hearts, you do not have the love 
of God in your hearts and you cannot have. 

And that this fundamental revelation be not 



HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 105 

misunderstood, near the close of his life he 
said : " A new commandment I give unto you, 
that ye love one another." No man could be, 
can be his disciple, his follower, and fail in 
the realisation of this fundamental teaching. 
" By this shall all men know that ye are my 
disciples, if ye love one another." And going 
back again to his ministry we find that it 
breathes through every teaching that he gave. 
It breathes through that short memorable 
prayer which we call the Lord's Prayer. It 
permeates the Sermon on the Mount. It is 
the very essence of his summing up of this 

discourse. We call it the Golden Rule. 
" Whatsoever ye would that men should do 
to you, do ye even so to them." Not that it 
was original with Jesus; other teachers sent 
of God had given it before to other peoples 
God's other children; but he gave it a new 
emphasis, a new setting. He made it funda- 
mental. 

So a man who is gripped at all vitally by 
Jesus' teaching of the personal fatherhood of 
God, and the personal brotherhood of man, 
simply can't help but make this the basic rule 
of his life and moreover find joy in so mak- 
ing it. A man who really comprehends this 
fundamental teaching can't be crafty, sneak- 
ing, dishonest, or dishonourable, in his busi- 
ness, or in any phase of his personal life. He 



io6 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 

never hogs the penny in other words, he 
never seeks to gain his own advantage to the 
disadvantage of another. He may be long- 
headed; he may be able to size up and seize 
conditions ; but he seeks no advantage for him- 
self to the detriment of his fellow, to the detri- 
ment of his community, or to the detriment of 
his extended community, the nation or the 
world. He is thoughtful, considerate, open, 
frank; and, moreover, he finds great joy in 
being so. 

I have never seen any finer statement of the 
essential reasonableness, therefore, of the 
essential truth of the value and the practice 
of the Golden Rule than that given by a mod- 
ern disciple of Jesus who left us but a few 
years ago. A poor boy, a successful business 
man, straight, square, considerate in all his 
dealings, a power among his fellows, a lamp 
indeed to the feet of many was Samuel Mil- 
ton Jones, thrice mayor of Toledo. Simple, 
unassuming, friend of all, rich as well as poor, 
poor as well as rich, friend of the outcast, 
the thief, the criminal, looking beyond the ex- 
terior, he saw as did Jesus, the human soul 
always intact, though it erred in its judgment 
as we all err in our judgments, each in his 
own peculiar way and that by forbearance, 
consideration, and love, it could be touched 
and the life redeemed redeemed to happiness, 



HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 107 

to usefulness, to service. Notwithstanding his 
many duties, business and political, he thought 
much and he loved to talk of the things we 
are considering. 

His brief statement of the fundamental rea- 
sons and the comprehensive results of the 
actual practice of the Golden Rule are shot 
through with such fine insight, such abound- 
ing comprehension, that they deserve to be- 
come immortal. He was my friend and I 
would not see them die. I reproduce them 
here : " As I view it, the Golden Rule is the 
supreme law of life. It may be paraphrased 
this way: As you do unto others, others will 
do unto you. What I give, I get. If I love 
you, really and truly and actively love you, 
you are as sure to love me in return as the 
earth is sure to be warmed by the rays of the 
midsummer sun. If I hate you, ill-treat you 
and abuse you, I am equally certain to arouse 
the same kind of antagonism towards me, un- 
less the Divine nature is so developed that it 
is dominant in you, and you have learned to 
love your enemies. What can be plainer? 
The Golden Rule is the law of action and 
reaction in the field of morals, just as definite, 
just as certain here as the law is definite and 
certain in the domain of physics. 

" I think the confusion with respect to the 
Golden Rule arises from the different concep- 



io8 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 

tions that we have of the word love. I use 
the word love as synonymous with reason, and 
when I speak of doing the loving thing, I mean 
the reasonable thing. When I speak of dealing 
with my fellow-men in an unreasonable way, 
I mean an unloving way. The terms are inter- 
changeable, absolutely. The reason why we 
know so little about the Golden Rule is be- 
cause we have not practised it." 

Was Mayor Jones a Christian? you ask. 
He was a follower of the Christ for it was he 
who said : " By this shall all men know ye 
are my disciples, if ye love one another." Was 
he a member of a religious organisation? I 
don't know it never occurred to me to ask 
him. Thinking men the world over are mak- 
ing a sharp distinction in these days between 
organised Christianity and essential Chris- 
tianity. 

The element of fear has lost its hold on the 
part of thinking men and women. It never 
opened up, it never can open up the springs 
of righteousness in the human heart. He be- 
lieved and he acted upon the belief that it was 
the spirit that the Master taught that God 
is a God of love and that He reveals Himself 
in terms of love to those who really know Him. 
He believed that there is joy to the human 
soul in following this inner guide and trans- 
lating its impulses into deeds of love and serv- 



HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 109 

ice for one's fellow-men. If we could, if we 
would thus translate religion into terms of life, 
it would become a source of perennial joy. 

It is not with observation, said Jesus, that 
the supreme thing that he taught the seek- 
ing and finding of the Kingdom of God will 
come. Do not seek it at some other place, 
some other time. It is within, and if within 
it will show forth. Make no mistake about 
that, it will show forth. It touches and it 
sensitises the inner springs of action in a man's 
or a woman's life. When a man realises his 
Divine sonship that Jesus taught, he will act 
as a son of God. Out of the heart spring 
either good or evil actions. Self-love, me, 
mine ; let me get all I can for myself, or, thou 
shalt love thy neighbour as thyself the 
Divine law of service, of mutuality the high- 
est source of ethics. 

You can trust any man whose heart is right. 
He will be straight, clean, reliable. His word 
will be as good as his bond. Personally you 
can't trust a man who is brought into any line 
of action, or into any institution through fear. 
The sore is there, liable to break out in cor- 
ruption at any time. This opening up of the 
springs of the inner life frees him also from 
the letter of the law, which after all consists 
of the traditions of men, and makes him sub- 
ject to that higher moral guide within. How 



no HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 

clearly Jesus illustrated this in his conversa- 
tions regarding the observance of the Sab- 
bath how the Sabbath was made for man and 
not man for the Sabbath, and how it was al- 
ways right to do good on the Sabbath. 

I remember some years ago a friend in my 
native state telling me the following interest- 
ing incident in connection with his grand- 
mother. It was in northern Illinois it might 
have been in New England. " As a boy," said 
he, " I used to visit her on the farm. She loved 
her cup of coffee for breakfast. Ordinarily 
she would grind it fresh each morning in the 
kitchen; but when Sunday morning came she 
would take her coffee-grinder down into the 
far end of the cellar, where no one could see 
and no one could hear her grind it." He could 
never quite tell, he said, whether it was to 
ease her own conscience, or in order to give no 
offence to her neighbours. 

Now, I can imagine Jesus passing by and 
stopping at that home it was a home known 
for its native kindly hospitality and meeting 
her just as she was coming out of the cellar 
with her coffee-grinder his quick and unerr- 
ing perception enabling him to take in the 
whole situation at once, and saying : " In the 
name of the Father, Aunt Susan, what were 
you doing with your coffee-grinder down in 
the cellar on this beautiful Sabbath morning? 



HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT in 

You like your cup of coffee, and I also like 
the coffee that you make ; thank God that you 
have it, and thank God that you have the good 
health to enjoy it. We can give praise to the 
Father through eating and drinking, if, as in 
everything else, these are done in moderation 
and we give value received for all the things 
that we use. So don't take your grinder down 
into the cellar on the Sabbath morning; but 
grind your coffee up here in God's sunshine, 
with a thankful heart that you have it to 
grind." 

And I can imagine him, as he passes out of 
the little front gate, turning and waving an- 
other good-bye and saying : " When I come 
again, Aunt Susan, be it week-day or Sabbath, 
remember God's sunshine and keep out of the 
cellar." And turning again in a half-joking 
manner : " And when you take those baskets of 
eggs to town, Aunt Susan, don't pick out too 
many of the large ones to keep for yourself, 
but take them just as the hens lay them. And, 
Aunt Susan, give good weight in your butter. 
This will do your soul infinitely more good 
than the few extra coins you would gain by 
too carefully calculating " Aunt Susan with 
all her lovable qualities, had a little tendency 
to close dealing. 

I think we do incalculable harm by separat- 
ing Jesus so completely from the more homely, 



commonplace affairs of our daily lives. If we 
had a more adequate account of his discourses 
with the people and his associations with the 
people, we would perhaps find that he was not, 
after all, so busy in saving the world that he 
didn't have time for the simple, homely en- 
joyments and affairs of the every-day life. The 
little glimpses that we have of him along 
these lines indicate to me that he had. Un- 
less we get his truths right into this phase of 
our lives, the chances are that we will miss 
them entirely. 

And I think that with all his earnestness, 
Jesus must have had an unusually keen sense 
of humour. With his unusual perceptions and 
his unusual powers in reading and in under- 
standing human nature, it could not be other- 
wise. That he had a keen sense for beauty; 
that he saw it, that he valued it, that he loved 
it, especially beauty in all nature, many of 
his discourses so abundantly prove. Religion 
with him was not divorced from life. It was 
the power that permeated every thought and 
every act of the daily life. 



VIII 



IF WE SEEK THE ESSENCE OF HIS REV- 
ELATION, AND THE PURPOSE OF 
HIS LIFE 

If we would seek the essence of Jesus' 
revelation, attested both by his words and his 
life, it was to bring a knowledge of the in- 
effable love of God to man, and by revealing 
this, to instil in the minds and hearts of men 
love for God, and a knowledge of and follow- 
ing of the ways of God. It was also then to 
bring a new emphasis of the Divine law of 
love the love of man for man. Combined, it 
results, so to speak, in raising men to a higher 
power, to a higher life, as individuals, as 
groups, as one great world group. 

It is a newly sensitised attitude of mind 
and heart that he brought and that he en- 
deavoured to reveal in all its matchless beauty 
a following not of the traditions of men, but 
fidelity to one's God, whereby the Divine rule 
in the mind and heart assumes supremacy and, 
as must inevitably follow, fidelity to one's fel- 
low-men. These are the essentials of Jesus' 
revelation the fundamental forces in his own 
113 



H4 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 

Jife. His every teaching, his every act, comes 
back to them. I believe also that all efforts 
to mystify the minds of men and women by 
later theories about him are contrary to his own 
expressed teaching, and in exact degree that 
they would seek to substitute other things for 
these fundamentals. 

I call them fundamentals. I call them his 
fundamentals. What right have I to call them 
his fundamentals? 

An occasion arose one day in the form of a 
direct question for Jesus to state in well-con- 
sidered and clear-cut terms the essence, the 
gist, of his entire teachings therefore, by his 
authority, the fundamentals of essential Chris- 
tianity. In the midst of one of the groups that 
he was speaking to one day, we are told that 
a certain lawyer arose an interpreter of, an 
authority on, the existing ecclesiastical law. 
The reference to him is so brief, unfortunately, 
that we cannot tell whether his question was 
to confound Jesus, as was so often the case, 
or whether being a liberal Jew he longed for 
an honest and truly helpful answer. From 
Jesus' remark to him, after his primary an- 
swer, we are justified in believing it was the 
latter. 

His question was : " Master, which is the 
great commandment in the law? " Jesus said 
unto him, " Thou shalt love the Lord thy 



HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 115 

God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, 
and with all thy mind. This is the first and 
great commandment. And the second is like 
unto it. Thou shalt love thy neighbour as 
thyself. On these two commandments hang 
all the law and the prophets." 

Here we have a wonderful statement from 
a wonderful source. So clear-cut is it that any 
wayfaring man, though a fool, cannot mistake 
it. Especially is this true when we couple 
with it this other statement of Jesus : " Think 
not that I am come to destroy the law, or the 
prophets; I am not come to destroy, but to 
fulfil." We must never forget that Jesus was 
born, lived, and died a Jew, the same as all 
of his disciples and they never regarded 
themselves in any other light. The basis of 
his religion was the religion of Israel. It was 
this he taught and expounded, now in the 
synagogue, now out on the hillside and by the 
lake-side. It was this that he tried to teach 
in its purity, that he tried to free from the 
hedges that ecclesiasticism had built around 
it, this that he endeavoured to raise to a still 
higher standard. 

One cannot find the slightest reference in 
any of his sayings that would indicate that he 
looked upon himself in any other light ex- 
cept the overwhelming sense that it was his 
mission to bring in the new dispensation by 



u6 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 

fulfilling the old, and then carrying it another 
great step forward, which he did in a wonder- 
ful way both God-ward and man-ward. 

We must not forget, then, that Jesus said 
that he did not come to destroy the Law and 
the Prophets, but to fulfil them. We must 
not forget, however, that before fulfilling them 
he had to free them. The freedom-giving, 
God-illumined words spoken by free God- 
illumined men, had, in the hands of those not 
God-illumined, later on become institutional- 
ised, made into a system, a code. The people 
were taught that only the priests had access 
to God. They were the custodians of God's 
favour and only through the institution could 
any man, or any woman, have access to God. 
This became the sacred thing, and as the years 
had passed this had become so hedged about 
by continually added laws and observances 
that all the spirit of religion had become 
crushed, stifled, beaten to the ground. 

The very scribes and Pharisees themselves, 
supposed to minister to the spiritual life and 
the welfare of the people, became enrobed in 
their fine millinery and arrogance, masters of 
the people, whose ministers they were sup- 
posed to be, as is so apt to be the case when 
an institution builds itself upon the free, all- 
embracing message of truth given by any 
prophet or any inspired teacher. It has 



HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 117 

occurred time and time again. Christianity 
knows it well. It is only by constant vigilance 
that religious freedom is preserved, from 
which alone conies any high degree of mo- 
rality, or any degree of free and upward- 
moving life among the people. 

It was on account of this shameful robbing 
of the people of their Divine birthright that 
the just soul of Jesus, abhorring both casuistry 
and oppression under the cloak of religion, 
gave utterance to that fine invective that he 
used on several occasions, the only times that 
he spoke in a condemnatory or accusing man- 
ner : " Now do ye, Pharisee, make clean the 
outside of the cup and the platter; but your 
inward part is full of ravening and wicked- 
ness. Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, 
hypocrites! For ye are as graves which ap- 
pear not, and the men that walk over them 
are not aware of them. . . . Woe unto you 
also, ye lawyers! For ye lade men with bur- 
dens grievous to be borne, and ye yourselves 
touch not the burdens with one of your fingers. 
. . . Woe unto you, lawyers! For ye have 
taken away the key of knowledge: ye entered 
not in yourselves, and them that were enter- 
ing in ye hindered." 

And here is the lesson for us. It is the 
spirit that must always be kept uppermost in 
religion. Otherwise even the revelation and 



n8 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 

the religion of Jesus could be compressed into 
a code, with its self-appointed instruments of 
interpretation, the same as the Pharisees did 
the Law and the Prophets that he so bitterly 
condemned, with a bravery so intrepid and so 
fearless that it finally caused his death. 

No, if God is not in the human soul wait- 
ing to make Himself known to the believing, 
longing heart, accessible to all alike without 
money and without price, without any pre- 
scribed code, then the words of Jesus have not 
been correctly handed down to us. And then 
again, confirming us in the belief that a man's 
deepest soul relation is a matter between him 
and his God, are his unmistakable and explicit 
directions in regard to prayer. 

It is so easy to substitute the secondary 
thing for the fundamental, the by-thing for 
the essential, the container for the thing itself. 
You will recall that symbolic act of Jesus at 
the last meeting, the Last Supper with his dis- 
ciples, the washing of the disciples' feet by 
the Master. The point that is intended to be 
brought out in the story is, of course, the 
extraordinary condescension of Jesus in doing 
this menial service for his disciples. " The 
feet-washing symbolises the attitude of hum- 
ble service to others. Every follower of 
Jesus must experience it." One of the dis- 
ciples is so astonished, even taken aback by 



HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT ng 

this menial service on the part of Jesus, that 
he says: Thou shall never wash my feet. 
Jesus answered him, " If I wash thee not, thou 
hast no part with me." 

In Oriental countries where sandals are 
worn that cover merely the soles of the feet, 
it was, it is the custom of the host to offer 
his guest who comes water with which to wash 
his feet. There is no reason why this simple 
incident of humble service, or rather this 
symbolic act of humble service, could not be 
taken and made an essential condition of sal- 
vation by any council that saw fit to make it 
such. Things just as strange as this have 
happened ; though any thinking man or woman 
to-day would deem it essentially foolish. 

It is an example of how the spirit of a 
beautiful act could be misrepresented to the 
people. For if you will look at them again, 
Jesus' words are very explicit : "If I wash 
thee not, thou hast no part with me." But 
hear Jesus' own comment as given in John: 
" So after he had washed their feet, and had 
taken his garments, and was set down again, 
he said unto them, Know ye what I have done 
to you? Ye call me Master and Lord: and 
ye say well ; for so I am. If I then, your Lord 
and Master, have washed your feet, ye also 
ought to wash one another's feet. For I have 
given you an example, that ye should do as I 



120 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 

have done to you. Verily, verily, I say unto 
you, The servant is not greater than his lord; 
neither he that is sent greater than he that 
sent him. If ye know these things, happy are 
ye if ye do them." It is a means to an end 
and not an end in itself. The spirit that it 
typifies is essential ; but not the act itself. 

The same could be rightly said of the Lord's 
Supper. It is an observance that can be made 
of great value, one very dear and valuable to 
many people. But it cannot, if Jesus is to be 
our authority, and if correctly reported, be 
by any means made a fundamental, an essen- 
tial of salvation. From the rebuke admin- 
istered by Jesus to his disciples in a number 
of cases where they were prone to drag down 
his meanings by their purely material inter- 
pretations, we should be saved from this. 

You will recall his teaching one day when 
he spoke of himself as the bread of life that 
a man may eat thereof and not die. Some of 
his Jewish hearers taking his words in a ma- 
terial sense and arguing in regard to them one 
with another said : " How can this man give 
us his flesh to eat? " Hearing them Jesus re- 
affirming his statement said : " Verily, verily, I 
say unto you, except ye eat of the flesh of the 
Son of Man, and drink his blood, ye have not 
life in yourselves. . . . For my flesh is meat 
indeed, and my blood is drink indeed." His 



HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 121 

disciples, likewise, prone here as so often to 
make a literal and material interpretation of 
his statements, said one to another : " This is 
a hard saying; who can hear him?" Or 
according to our idiom who can understand 
him? Jesus asked them squarely if what he 
had just said caused them to stumble, and in 
order to be sure that they might not miss his 
real meaning and therefore teaching, said : " It 
is the spirit that quickeneth ; the flesh profiteth 
nothing : the words that I speak unto you, they 
are spirit, and they are life." 

Try as we will, we cannot get away from 
the fact that it was the words of truth that 
Jesus brought that were ever uppermost in 
his mind. He said, Follow me, not some one 
else, nor something else that would claim to 
represent me. And follow me merely because 
I lead you to the Father. 

So supremely had this young Jewish 
prophet, the son of a carpenter, made God's 
business his business, that he had come into 
the full realisation of the oneness of his life 
with the Father's life. He was able to realise 
and to say, " I and my Father are one." He 
was able to bring to the world a knowledge of 
the great fact of facts the essential oneness 
of the human with the Divine that God taber- 
nacles with men, that He makes His abode 
in the minds and the hearts of those who 



122 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT' 

through desire and through will open their 
hearts to His indwelling presence. 

The first of the race, he becomes the re- 
vealer of this great eternal truth the media- 
tor, therefore, between God and man in very 
truth the Saviour of men. " If a man love me," 
said he, " he will keep my words : and my 
Father will love him, and we will come unto 
him, and make our abode with him. ... If 
ye keep my commandments, ye shall abide in 
my love; even as I have kept my Father's 
commandments and abide in his love." 

It is our eternal refusal to follow Jesus by 
listening to the words of life that he brought, 
and our proneness to substitute something else 
in their place, that brings the barrenness that 
is so often evident in the everyday life of the 
Christian. We have been taught to believe in 
Jesus; we have not been taught to believe 
Jesus. This has resulted in a separation of 
Christianity from life. The predominating 
motive has been the saving of the soul. It has 
resulted too often in a selfish, negative, repres- 
sive, ineffective religion. As Jesus said : " And 
why call ye me, Lord, Lord, and do not the 
things which I say?" 

We are just beginning to realise at all 
adequately that it was the salvation of the life 
that he taught. When the life is redeemed to 
righteousness through the power of the in- 



HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 123 

dwelling God and moves out in love and in 
service for one's fellow-men, the soul is then 
saved. 

A man may be a believer in Jesus for a mil- 
lion years and still be an outcast from the 
Kingdom of God and His righteousness. But 
a man can't believe Jesus, which means follow- 
ing his teachings, without coming at once into 
the Kingdom and enjoying its matchless 
blessings both here and hereafter. And if 
there is one clear-cut teaching of the Master, 
it is that the life here determines and with 
absolute precision the life to come. 

One need not then concern himself with this 
or that doctrine, whether it be true or false. 
Later speculations and theories are not for 
him. Jesus' own saying applies here : " If any 
man will do his will he shall know of the doc- 
trine, whether it be of God." He enters into 
the Kingdom, the Kingdom of Heaven here 
and now; and when the time comes for him 
to pass out of this life, he goes as a joyous 
pilgrim, full of anticipation for the Kingdom 
that awaits him, and the Master's words go 
with him : " In my Father's house are many 
mansions." 

By thus becoming a follower of Jesus rather 
than merely a believer in Jesus, he gradually 
comes into possession of insights and powers 
that the Master taught would follow in the 



124 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 

lives of those who became his followers. The 
Holy Spirit, the Divine Comforter, of which 
Jesus spoke, the Spirit of Truth, that awaits 
our bidding, will lead continually to the high- 
est truth and wisdom and insight and power. 
Kant's statement, " The other world is not 
another locality, but only another way of see- 
ing things," is closely allied to the Master's 
statement : " The Kingdom of God is within 
you." And closely allied to both is this 
statement of a modern prophet : " The prin- 
ciple of Christianity and of every true re- 
ligion is within the soul the realisation 
of the incarnation of God in every human 
being." 

When we turn to Jesus' own teachings we 
find that his insistence was not primarily upon 
the saving of the soul, but upon the saving of 
the life for usefulness, for service, here and 
now, for still higher growth and unfoldment, 
whereby the soul might be grown to a suffi- 
cient degree that it would be worth the saving. 
And this is one of the great facts that is now 
being recognised and preached by the forward- 
looking men and women in our churches and 
by many equally religious outside of our 
churches. 

And so all aspiring, all thinking, forward- 
looking men and women of our day are not 
interested any more in theories about, expla- 



HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 125 

nations of, or dogmas about Jesus. They are 
being won and enthralled by the wonderful 
personality and life of Jesus. They are being 
gripped by the power of his teachings. They 
do not want theories about God they want 
God and God is what Jesus brought God 
as the moving, the predominating, the all- 
embracing force in the individual life. But 
he who finds the Kingdom of God, whose life 
becomes subject to the Divine rule and life 
within, realises at once also his true relations 
with the whole with his neighbour, his 
fellow-men. He realises that his neighbour 
is not merely the man next door, the man 
around the corner, or even the man in the 
next town or city; but that his neighbour is 
every man and every woman in the world 
because all children of the same infinite Father, 
all bound in the same direction, but over many 
different roads. 

The man who has come under the influence 
and the domination of the Divine rule, realises 
that his interests lie in the same direction as 
the interests of all, that he cannot gain for 
himself any good that is, any essential good 
at the expense of the good of all ; but rather 
that his interests, his welfare, and the interests 
and the welfare of all others are identical. 
God's rule, the Divine rule, becomes for him, 
therefore, the fundamental rule in the business 



126 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 

world, the dominating rule in political life and 
action, the dominating rule in the law and 
relations of nations, 

Jesus did not look with much favour upon 
outward form, ceremony, or with much favour 
upon formulated, or formal religion; and he 
somehow or other seemed to avoid the com- 
pany of those who did. We find him almost 
continually down among the people, the poor, 
the needy, the outcast, the sinner wherever 
he could be of service to the Father, that is, 
wherever he could be of service to the Father's 
children. According to the accounts he was 
inot always as careful in regard to those with 
whom he associated as the more respectable 
ones, the more respectable classes of his day 
thought he should be. They remarked it many 
times. Jesus noticed it and remarked in 
turn. 

We find him always where the work was 
to be done friend equally of the poor and 
humble, and those of station truly friend of 
man, teaching, helping, uplifting. And then 
we find him out on the mountain side in the 
quiet, in communion to keep his realisation of 
his oneness with the Father intact; and with 
this help he went down regularly to the peo- 
ple, trying to lift their minds and lives up to 
the Divine ideal that he revealed to them, that 
they in turn might realise their real relations 



HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 127 

one with another, that the Kingdom of God 
and His righteousness might grow and become 
the dominating law and force in the world 
" Thy Kingdom come, Thy Will be done on 
earth as it is in Heaven." 

It is this Kingdom idea, the Divine rule, the 
rule of God in all of the relations and affairs of 
men on earth that is gripping earnest men and 
women in great numbers among us to-day. 
Under the leadership of these thinking, God- 
impelled men and women, many of our 
churches are pushing their endeavours out into 
social service activities along many different 
lines; and the result is they are calling into 
their ranks many able men and women, 
especially younger men and women, who 
are intensely religious, but to whom for- 
mal, inactive religion never made any ap- 
peal. 

When the Church begins actually to throw 
the Golden Rule onto its banner, not in theory 
but in actual practice, actually forgetting self 
in the Master's service, careless even of her 
own interests, her membership, she thereby 
calls into her ranks vast numbers of the best 
of the race, especially among the young, so 
that the actual result is a membership not only 
larger than she could ever hope to have other- 
wise, but a membership that commands such 
respect and that exercises such power, that 



128 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 

she is astounded at her former stupidity in 
being shackled so long by the traditions of the 
past. A new life is engendered. There is the 
joy of real accomplishment. 

We are in an age of great changes. Advanc- 
ing knowledge necessitates changes. And 
may I say a word here to our Christian minis- 
try, that splendid body of men for whom I 
have such supreme admiration? One of the 
most significant facts of our time is this wide- 
spread inclination and determination on the 
part of such great numbers of thinking men 
and women to go directly to Jesus for their 
information of, and their inspiration from him. 
The beliefs and the voice of the laymen, those 
in our churches and those out of our churches, 
must be taken into account and reckoned with. 
Jesus is too large and too universal a charac- 
ter to be longer the sole possession, the prop- 
erty of any organisation. 

There is a splendid body of young men and 
young women numbering into untold thou- 
sands, who are being captured by the person- 
ality and the simple direct message of Jesus. 
Many of these have caught his spirit and are 
going off into other lines of the Master's serv- 
ice. They are doing effective and telling 
work there. Remember that when the spirit 
of the Christ seizes a man, it is through the 
channel of present-day forms and present-day 



HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 139 

terms, not in those of fifteen hundred, or six- 
teen hundred, or even three hundred years ago. 

There is a spirit of intellectual honesty that 
prevents many men and women from subscrib- 
ing to anything to which they cannot give 
their intellectual assent, as well as their moral 
and spiritual assent. They do not object to 
creeds. They know that a creed is but a state- 
ment, a statement of a man's or a woman's 
belief, whether it be in connection with reli- 
gion, or in connection with anything else. But 
what they do object to is dogma, that unholy 
thing that lives on credulity, that is therefore 
destructive of the intellectual and the moral 
life of every man and every woman who al- 
lows it to lay its paralysing hand upon them, 
that can be held to if one is at all honest and 
given to thought, only through intellectual 
chicanery. 

We must not forget also that God is still at 
work, revealing Himself more fully to man- 
kind through modern prophets, through mod- 
ern agencies. His revelation is not closed. 
It is still going on. The silly presumption in 
the statement therefore " the truth once de- 
livered." 

It is well occasionally to call to mind these 
words by Robert Burns, singing free and with 
an untrammelled mind and soul from his 
heather-covered hills: 



130 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 

Here's freedom to him that wad read, 
Here's freedom to him that wad write ; 

There's nane ever feared that the truth should 

be heared 
But them that the truth wad indict. 

It is essential to remember that we are in 
possession of knowledge, that we are face to 
face with conditions that are different from 
any in the previous history of Christendom. 
The Christian church must be sure that it 
moves fast enough so as not to alienate, but 
to draw into it that great body of intellectually 
alive, intellectually honest young men and 
women who have the Christ spirit of service 
and who are mastered by a great purpose of 
accomplishment. Remember that these young 
men and women are now merely standing 
where the entire church will stand in a few 
years. Remember that any man or woman 
who has the true spirit of service has the spirit 
of Christ and more, has the religion of the 
Christ. 

Remember that Jesus formulated no organi- 
sation. His message of the Kingdom was so 
far-reaching that no organisation could ever 
possibly encompass it, though an organisation 
may be, and has been, a great aid in actual- 
ising it here on earth. He never made any 
conditions as to through whom, or what, his 



HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 131 

truth should be spread, and he would condemn 
today any instrumentality that would abrogate 
to itself any monopoly of his truth, just as he 
condemned those ecclesiastical authorities of 
his day who presumed to do the same in 
connection with the truth of God's earlier 
prophets. 

And so I would say to the Church beware 
and be wise. Make your conditions so that 
you can gain the allegiance and gain the help 
of this splendid body of young men and young 
women. Many of them are made of the stock 
that Jesus would choose as his own apostles. 
Among the young men will be our greatest 
teachers, our great financiers, our best legis- 
lators, our most valuable workers and organ- 
isers in various fields of social service, our 
most widely read authors, eminent and in- 
fluential editorial and magazine writers as 
well as managers. 

Many of these young women will have high 
and responsible positions as educators. Some 
will be heads and others will be active workers 
in our widely extended and valuable women's 
clubs. Some will have a hand in political ac- 
tion, in lifting politics out of its many-times 
low condition into its rightful state in being 
an agent for the accomplishment of the peo- 
ple's best purposes and their highest good. 
Some will be editors of widely circulating and 



132 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 

influential women's magazines. Some will be 
mothers, true mothers of the children of 
others, denied their rights and their privileges. 
Make it possible for them, nay, make it incum- 
bent upon them to come in, to work within 
the great Church organisation. 

It cannot afford that they stay out. It is 
suicidal to keep them out. Any other type of 
organisation that did not look constantly to 
commanding the services of the most capable 
and expert in its line would fall in a very few 
months into the ranks of the ineffectives. A 
business or a financial organisation that did 
not do the same would go into financial bank- 
ruptcy in even a shorter length of time. By 
attracting this class of men and women into 
its ranks it need fear neither moral nor finan- 
cial bankruptcy. 

But remember, many men and women of 
large calibre are so busy doing God's work 
in the world that they have no time and no 
inclination to be attracted by anything that 
does not claim their intellectual as well as 
their moral assent. The Church must speak 
fully and unequivocally in terms of present-day 
thought and present-day knowledge, to win 
the allegiance or even to attract the attention 
of this type of men and women. 

And may I say here this word to those out- 
side, and especially to this class of young men 



HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 133 

and young women outside of our churches? 
Changes, and therefore advances in matters 
of this kind come slowly. This is true from 
the very nature of human nature. Inherited 
beliefs, especially when it comes to matters 
of religion, take the deepest hold and are the 
slowest to change. Not in all cases, but this 
is the general rule. 

Those who hold on to the old are earnest, 
honest. They believe that these things are 
too sacred to be meddled with, or even some- 
times, to be questioned. The ordinary mind 
is slow to distinguish between tradition and 
truth especially where the two have been so 
fully and so adroitly mixed. Many are not in 
possession of the newer, the more advanced 
knowledge in various fields that you are in 
possession of. But remember this in even a 
dozen years a mighty change has taken place 
except in a church whose very foundation 
and whose sole purpose is dogma. 

In most of our churches, however, the great 
bulk of our ministers are just as forward- 
looking, just as earnest as you, and are deeply 
desirous of following and presenting the high- 
est truth in so far as it lies within their power 
to do so. It is a splendid body of men, willing 
to welcome you on your own grounds, longing 
for your help. It is a mighty engine for good. 
Go into it. Work with it. Work through it. 



134 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 

The best men in the Church are longing for 
your help. They need it more than they need 
anything else. I can assure you of this I 
have talked with many. 

They feel their handicaps. They are mov- 
ing as rapidly as they find it possible to move. 
On the whole, they are doing splendid work 
and with a big, fine spirit of which you know 
but little. You will find a wonderful spirit of 
self-sacrifice, also. You will find a stimulating 
and precious comradeship on the part of many. 
You will find that you will get great good, 
even as you are able to give great good. 

The Church, as everything else, needs to 
keep its machinery in continual repair. Help 
take out the worn-out parts but not too sud- 
denly. The Church is not a depository, but 
an instrument and engine of truth and right- 
eousness. Some of the older men do not 
realise this; but they will die off. Respect 
their beliefs. Honest men have honest respect 
for differences of opinion, for honest differ- 
ences in thought. Sympathy is a great har- 
moniser. " Differences of opinion, intellectual 
distinctions, these must ever be separation 
of mind, but unity of heart." 

I like these words of Lyman Abbott. You 
will like them. They are spoken out of a full 
life of rich experience and splendid service. 
They have, moreover, a sort of unifying effect. 



HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 135 

They are more than a tonic : " Of all charac- 
ters in history none so gathers into himself 
and reflects from himself all the varied virtues 
of a complete manhood as does Jesus of Naza- 
reth. And the world is recognising it. ... 
If you go back to the olden time and the old 
conflicts, the question was, ' What is the rela- 
tion of Jesus Christ to the Eternal?' Wars 
have been fought over the question, ' Was he 
of one substance with the Father? ' I do not 
know; I do not know of what substance the 
Father is; I do not know of what substance 
Jesus Christ is. What I do know is this 
that when I look into the actual life that I 
know about, the men and women that are 
about me, the men and women in all the his- 
tory of the past, of all the living beings that 
ever lived and walked the earth, there is no 
one that so fills my heart with reverence, with 
affection, with loyal love, with sincere desire 
to follow, as doth Jesus Christ. . . . 

" I do not need to decide whether he was 
born of a virgin. I do not need to decide 
whether he rose from the dead. I do not 
need to decide whether he made water into 
wine, or fed five thousand with two loaves and 
five small fishes. Take all that away, and 
still he stands the one transcendent figure to- 
ward whom the world has been steadily grow- 
ing, and whom the world has not yet over- 



136 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 

taken even in his teachings. ... I do not need 
to know what is his metaphysical relation to 
the Infinite. I say it reverently I do not 
care. I know for me he is the great Teacher; 
I know for me he is the great Leader whose 
work I want to do; and I know for me he is 
the great Personality, whom I want to be like. 
That I know. Theology did not give that to 
me, and theology cannot get it away from 
me." 

And what a basis as a test of character is 
this twofold injunction this great fundamen- 
tal of Jesus! All religion that is genuine 
flowers in character. It was Benjamin Jowett 
who said, and most truly : " The value of a re- 
ligion is in the ethical dividend that it pays." 
When the heart is right towards God we have 
the basis, the essence of religion the con- 
sciousness of God in the soul of man. We 
have truth in the inward parts. When the 
heart is right towards the fellow-man we have 
the essential basis of ethics; for again we 
have truth in the inward parts. 

Out of the heart are the issues of life. When 
the heart is right all outward acts and rela- 
tions are right. Love draws one to the very 
heart of God; and love attunes one to all the 
highest and most valued relationships in our 
human life. 

Fear can never be a basis of either religion 



HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 137 

or ethics. The one who is moved by fear 
makes his chief concern the avoidance of de- 
tection on the one hand, or the escape of pun- 
ishment on the other. Men of large calibre 
have an unusual sagacity in sifting the un- 
essential from the essential as also the false 
from the true. Lincoln, when replying to the 
question as to why he did not unite himself 
with some church organisation, said : " When 
any church will inscribe over its altar, as its 
sole qualification of membership, the Saviour's 
condensed statement of the substance of both 
law and gospel: Thou shalt love the Lord 
thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy 
soul, and with all thy mind, and thy neigh- 
bour as thyself, that church shall I join with 
all my heart and soul." 

He was looked upon by many in his day as 
a non-Christian by some as an infidel. His 
whole life had a profound religious basis, so 
deep and so all-absorbing that it gave him 
those wonderful elements of personality that 
were instantly and instinctively noticed by, 
and that moved all men who came in touch 
with him; and that sustained him so wonder- 
fully, according to his own confession, through 
those long, dark periods of the great crisis. 
The fact that m yesterday's New York paper 
Sunday paper I saw the notice of a sermon 
in one of our Presbyterian pulpits Lincoln, 



138 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 

the Christian shows that we have moved up 
a round and are approaching more and more 
to an essential Christianity. 

Similar to this statement or rather belief 
was that of Emerson, Jefferson, Franklin, and 
a host of other men among us whose lives have 
been lives of accomplishment and service for 
their fellow-men. Emerson, who said : " A 
man should learn to detect and watch that 
gleam of light which flashes across his mind 
from within, more than the lustre of the firma- 
ment of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses 
without notice his thought, because it is his. 
In every work of genius we recognise our own 
rejected thoughts. They come back to us with 
a certain alienated majesty." Emerson, who 
also said : " I believe in the still, small voice, 
and that voice is the Christ within me." It was 
he of whom the famous Father Taylor in Bos- 
ton said : " It may be that Emerson is going to 
hell, but of one thing I am certain: he will 
change the climate there and emigration will 
set that way." 

So thought Jefferson, who said : " I have 
sworn eternal hostility to every form of 
tyranny over the minds of men." And as he, 
great prophet, with his own hand penned that 
immortal document the Declaration of Amer- 
ican Independence one can almost imagine 
the Galilean prophet standing at his shoulder 



HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 139 

and saying: Thomas, I think it well to write 
it so. Both had a burning indignation for that 
species of self-seeking either on the part of an 
individual or an organisation that would seek 
to enchain the minds and thereby the lives 
of men and women, and even lay claim to their 
children. Yet Jefferson in his time was fre- 
quently called an atheist and merely because 
men in those days did not distinguish as clearly 
as we do today between ecclesiasticism and 
religion, between formulated and essential 
Christianity. 

So we are brought back each time to 
Jesus' two fundamentals and these come out 
every time foursquare with the best thought 
of our time. The religion of Jesus is thereby 
prevented from being a mere tribal religion. 
It is prevented from being merely an organi- 
sation that could possibly have his sanction as 
such that is, an organisation that would be 
able to say: This is his, and this only. It 
makes it have a world-wide and eternal con- 
tent. The Kingdom that Jesus taught is in- 
finitely broader in its scope and its inclusive- 
ness than any organisation can be, or that all 
organisations combined can be. 



IX 



HIS PURPOSE OF LIFTING UP, ENERGIS- 
ING, BEAUTIFYING, AND SAVING THE 
ENTIRE LIFE: THE SAVING OF 
THE SOUL IS SECONDARY; 
BUT FOLLOWS 

We have made the statement that Jesus did 
unusual things, but that he did them on ac- 
count of, or rather by virtue of, his unusual in- 
sight into and understanding of the laws 
whereby they could be done. His understand- 
ing of the powers of the mind and spirit was 
intuitive and very great. As an evidence of 
this were his numerous cases of healing the 
sick and the afflicted. 

Intuitively he perceived the existence and 
the nature of the subjective mind, and in con- 
nection with it the tremendous powers of sug- 
gestion. Intuitively he was able to read, to 
diagnose the particular ailment and the cause 
of the ailment before him. His thought was 
so poised that it was energised by a subtle and 
peculiar spiritual power. Such confidence did 
his personality and his power inspire in others 
that he was able to an unusual degree to reach 
and to arouse the slumbering subconsious mind 
140 



HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 141 

of the sufferer and to arouse into action its 
own slumbering powers whereby the life force 
of the body could transcend and remould its 
error-ridden and error-stamped condition. 

In all these cases he worked through the 
operation of law it is exactly what we know 
of the laws of suggestion today. The remark- 
able cases of healing that are being accom- 
plished here and there among us today are 
done unquestionably through the understand- 
ing and use of the same laws that Jesus was 
the supreme master of. 

By virtue of his superior insight his un- 
derstanding of the laws of the mind and spirit 
he was able to use them so fully and so 
effectively that he did in many cases elimi- 
nate the element of time in his healing 
ministrations. But even he was dependent in 
practically all cases, upon the mental co-opera- 
tion of the one who would be healed. Where 
this was full and complete he succeeded ; where 
it was not he failed. Such at least again and 
again is the statement in the accounts that 
we have of these facts in connection with his 
life and work. There were places where 
we are told he could do none of his mighty 
works on account of their unbelief, and he de- 
parted from these places and went elsewhere. 
Many times his question was : " Believe ye 
that I am able to do this?' Then: "Accord- 



i 4 a HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 

ing to your faith be it unto you," and the 
healing was accomplished. 

The laws of mental and spiritual thera- 
peutics are identically the same today as they 
were in the days of Jesus and his disciples, who 
made the healing of sick bodies a part of their 
ministration. It is but fair to presume from 
the accounts that we have that in the early 
Church of the Disciples, and for well on to two 
hundred years after Jesus' time, the healing 
of the sick and the afflicted went hand in hand 
with the preaching and the teaching of the 
Kingdom. There are those who believe that 
it never should have been abandoned. As a 
well-known writer has said : " Healing is the 
outward and practical attestation of the power 
and genuineness of spiritual religion, and 
ought not to have dropped out of the Church." 
Recent sincere efforts to re-establish it in 
church practice, following thereby the Mas- 
ter's injunction, is indicative of the thought 
that is alive in connection with the matter to- 
day.* From the accounts that we have Jesus 

* The Emmanuel Movement in Boston in connec- 
tion with Emmanuel Church, inaugurated some time 
ago under the leadership and direction of two well- 
known ministers, Dr. Worcester and Dr. McComb, 
and a well-known physician, Dr. Coriat, and similar 
movements in other cities is an attestation of this. 

That most valuable book under the joint author- 
ship of these three men: "Religion and Medicine," 



HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 143 

seems to have engaged in works of healing 
more during his early than during his later 
ministry. He may have used it as a means to 
an end. On account of his great love and 
sympathy for the physical sufferer as well as 
for the moral sufferer, it is but reasonable to 
suppose that it was an integral part of his an- 
nounced purpose the saving of the life, of 
the entire life, for usefulness, for service, for 
happiness. 

And so we have this young Galilean prophet, 
coming from an hitherto unknown Jewish 
family in the obscure little village of Nazareth, 
giving obedience in common with his four 
brothers and his sisters to his father and his 
mother; but by virtue of a supreme aptitude 
for and an irresistible call to the things of 
the spirit made irresistible through his over- 
whelming love for the things of the spirit 
he is early absorbed by the realisation of the 
truth that God is his father and that all men 
are brothers. 

The thought that God is his father and that 
he bears a unique and filial relationship to God 
so possesses him that he is filled, permeated 

Moffat, Yard and Company, New York, will be found 
of absorbing interest and of great practical value by 
many. The amount of valuable as well as interest- 
ing and reliable material that it contains is indeed 
remarkable. 



144 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 

with the burning desire to make this newborn 
message of truth and thereby of righteousness 
known to the world. 

His own native religion, once vibrating 
through the souls of the prophets as the voice 
of God, has become so obscured, so hedged 
about, so killed by dogma, by ceremony, by 
outward observances, that it has become a 
mean and pitiable thing, and produces mean 
and pitiable conditions in the lives of his peo- 
ple. The institution has become so overgrown 
that the spirit has gone. But God finds an- 
other prophet, clearly and supremely open to 
His spirit, and Jesus comes as the Messiah, the 
Divine Son of God, the Divine Son of Man, 
bringing to the earth a new Dispensation. It 
is the message of the Divine Fatherhood of 
God, God whose controlling character is love, 
and with it the Divine sonship of man. An 
integral part of it is all men are brothers. 

He comes as the teacher of a new, a higher 
righteousness. He brings the message and he 
expounds the message of the Kingdom of God. 
All men he teaches must repent and turn from 
their sins, and must henceforth live in this 
Kingdom. It is an inner kingdom. Men shall 
not say: Behold it is here or it is there; for, 
behold, it is within you. God is your father 
and God longs for your acknowledgment of 
Him as your father; He longs for your love 



HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 145 

even as He loves you. You are children of 
God, but you are not true Sons of God until 
through desire the Divine rule and life be- 
comes supreme in your minds and hearts. It 
is thus that you will find the Kingdom of God. 
When you do, then your every act will show 
forth in accordance with this Divine ideal and 
guide, and the supreme law of conduct in your 
lives will be love for your neighbour, for all 
mankind. Through this there will then in 
time become actualised the Kingdom of 
Heaven on the earth. 

He comes in no special garb, no millinery, 
no brass bands, no formulas, no dogmas, no 
organisation other than the Kingdom, to up- 
hold and become a slave to, and in turn be 
absorbed by, as was the organisation that he 
found strangling all religion in the lives of 
his people and which he so bitterly condemned. 
What he brought was something infinitely 
transcending this the Kingdom of God and 
His righteousness, to which all men were heirs 
equal heirs and thereby redemption from 
their sins, therefore salvation, the saving of 
their lives, would be the inevitable result of 
their acknowledgment of and allegiance to the 
Divine rule. 

How he embraced all such human sympa- 
thy coming not to destroy but to fulfil; not 
to judge the world but to save the world. 



146 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 

How he loved the children! How he loved to 
have them about him! How he loved their 
simplicity, and native integrity of mind and 
heart ! Hear him as he says : " Verily I say 
unto you, Whosoever shall not receive the 
Kingdom of God as a little child, he shall not 
enter therein " ; and again : " Suffer the little 
children to come unto me, and forbid them 
not ; for of such is the Kingdom of God." The 
makers of dogma, in evolving some three hun- 
dred years later on the dogma of the inherent 
sinfulness and degradation of the human life 
and soul, could certainly find not the slightest 
trace of any basis for it again in these words 
and acts of Jesus. 

We find him sympathising with and min- 
gling with and seeking to draw unto the way of 
his own life the poor, the outcast, the sinner, 
the same as the well-to-do arid those of station 
and influence seeking to draw all through 
love and knowledge to the Father. 

There is a sense of justice and righteousness 
in his soul, however, that balks at oppression, 
injustice, and hypocrisy. He therefore con- 
demns and in scathing terms those and only 
those who would seek to place any barrier be- 
tween the free soul of any man and his God, 
iwho would bind either the mind or the con- 
science of man to any prescribed formulas or 
dogmas. Honouring, therefore the forms that 



HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 147 

his intelligence and his conscience allowed 
him to honour, he disregarded those that they 
did not. 

Like other good Jewish rabbis, for he was 
looked upon during his ministry and often ad- 
dressed as Rabbi, he taught in the synagogues 
of his people; but oftener out on the hillsides 
and by the lake-side, under the blue sky and 
the stars of heaven. Giving due reverence to 
the Law and the Prophets the religion of his 
people and his own early religion but in 
spirit and in discriminating thought so far 
transcending them, that the people marvelled 
at his teachings and said surely this a prophet 
come from God; no man ever spoke to us as 
he speaks. By the ineffable beauty of his life 
and the love and the winsomeness of his per- 
sonality, and by the power of the truths that 
he taught, he won the hearts of the common 
people. They followed him and his following 
continually increased. 

Through it all, however, he incurred the in- 
creasing hostility and the increasing hatred 
of the leaders, the hierarchy of the existing 
religious organisation. They were animated 
by a double motive, that of protecting them- 
selves, and that of protecting their established 
religion. But in their slavery to the organisa- 
tion, and because unable to see that it was 
the spirit of true religion that he brought and 



i 4 8 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 

taught, they cruelly put him to death the 
same as the organisation established later on 
in his name, put numbers of God's true proph- 
ets, Jesus' truest disciples to death, and essen- 
tially for the same reasons. 

Jesus' quick and almost unerring perception 
enabled him to foresee this. It did not deter 
him from going forward with his message, 
standing resolutely and superbly by his reve- 
lation, and at the last almost courting death 
feeling undoubtedly that the sealing of his rev- 
elation and message with his very life blood 
would but serve to give it its greatest power 
and endurance. Heroically he met the fate 
that he perceived was conspiring to end his 
career, to wreck his teachings and his influ- 
ence. He went forth to die clear-sighted and 
unafraid. 

He died for the sake of the truth of the mes- 
sage that he lived and so diligently and hero- 
ically laboured for the message of the in- 
effable love of God for all His children and 
the bringing of them into the Father's King- 
dom. And we must believe from his whole 
life's teaching, not to save their souls from 
some future punishment; not through any de- 
mand of satisfaction on the part of God; not 
as any substitutionary sacrifice to appease the 
demands of an angry God for it was the ex- 
act opposite of this that his whole life teach- 



HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 149 

ing endeavoured to make known. It was su- 
premely the love of the Father and His longing 
for the love and allegiance, therefore the com- 
plete life and service of His children. It was 
the beauty of holiness the beauty of whole- 
ness the wholeness of life, the saving of the 
whole life from the sin and sordidness of self 
and thereby giving supreme satisfaction to 
God. It was love, not fear. If not, then al- 
most in a moment he changed the entire pur- 
pose and content, the entire intent of all his 
previous life work. This is unthinkable. 

In his last act he did not abrogate his own 
expressed statement, that the very essence of 
his message was expressed, as love to God and 
love to one's neighbour. He did not abrogate 
his continually repeated declaration that it 
was the Kingdom of God and His righteous- 
ness, which brings man's life into right rela- 
tions with God and into right relations with 
his fellow-men, that it was his purpose to re- 
veal and to draw all men to, thereby aiding 
God's eternal purpose to establish in this 
world a state which he designated the King- 
dom of Heaven wherein a social order of 
brotherliness and justice, wrought and main- 
tained through the potency of love, would pre- 
vail. In doing this he revealed the character 
of God by being himself an embodiment of it. 

It was the power of a truth that was to save 



i 5 o HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 

the life that he was always concerned with. 
Therefore his statement that the Son of Man 
has come that men might have life and might 
have it more abundantly to save men from 
sin and from failure, and secondarily from 
their consequences; to make them true Sons 
of God and fit subjects and fit workers in His 
Kingdom. Conversion according to Jesus is 
the fact of this Divine rule in the mind and 
heart whereby the life is saved the saving 
of the soul follows. It is the direct concomi- 
tant of the saved life. 

In his death he sealed his own statement: 
" The law and the prophets were until John ; 
since that time the Kingdom of God is 
preached, and every man presseth into it." 
Through his death he sealed the message of 
his life when putting it in another form he 
said : " Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that 
heareth my word and believeth on Him that 
sent me hath everlasting life, and shall not 
come into condemnation: but is passed from 
death unto life." 

In this majestic life divinity and humanity 
meet. Here is the incarnation. The first of 
the race consciously, vividly, and fully to 
realise that God incarnates Himself and has 
His abode in the hearts and the lives of men, 
the first therefore to realise his Divine Son- 
ship and become able thereby to reveal and to 



HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 151 

teach the Divine Fatherhood of God and the 
Divine Sonship of Man. 

In this majestic life is the atonement, the 
realisation of the at-one-ment of the Divine in 
the human, made manifest in his own life and 
in the way that he taught, sealed then by his 
own blood. 

In this majestic life we have the mediator, 
the medium or connector of the Divine and the 
human. In it we have the Saviour, the very 
incarnation of the truth that he taught, and 
that lifts the minds and thereby the lives of 
men up to their Divine ideal and pattern, that 
redeems their lives from the sordidness and 
selfishness and sin of the hitherto purely ma- 
terial self, and that being thereby saved, makes 
them fit subjects for the Father's Kingdom. 

In this majestic life is the full embodiment 
of the beauty of holiness whose words have 
gone forth and whose spirit is ceaselessly at 
work in the world, drawing men and women 
up to their divine ideal, and -that will continue 
so to draw all in proportion as his words of 
truth and his life are lifted up throughout the 
world. 



X 



SOME METHODS OF ATTAINMENT 

After this study of the teachings of the Di- 
vine Master let us know this. It is the ma- 
terial that is the transient, the temporary; 
and the mental and spiritual that is the real 
and the eternal. We must not become slaves 
to habit. The material alone can never bring 
happiness much less satisfaction. These lie 
deeper. That conversation between Jesus and 
the rich young man is full of significance for 
us all, especially in this ambitious, striving, 
restless age. 

Abundance of life is determined not alone 
by one's material possessions, but primarily by 
one's riches of mind and spirit. A world of 
truth is contained in these words : " Life is 
what we are alive to. It is not a length, but 
breadth. To be alive only to appetite, pleas- 
ure, mere luxury or idleness, pride or money- 
making, and not to goodness and kindness, 
purity and love, history, poetry, and music, 
flowers, God and eternal hopes, is to be all 
but dead." 

Why be so eager to gain possession of the 



HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 153 

hundred thousand or the half-million acres, 
of so many millions of dollars? Soon, and it 
may be before you realise it, all must be left. 
It is as if a man made it his ambition to ac- 
cumulate a thousand or a hundred thousand 
automobiles. All soon will become junk. But 
so it is with all material things beyond 
what we can actually and profitably use for 
our good and the good of others and that we 
actually do so use. 

A man can eat just so many meals during 
the year or during life. If he tries to eat more 
he suffers thereby. He can wear only so many 
suits of clothing ; if he tries to wear more, he 
merely wears himself out taking off and put- 
ting on. Again it is as Jesus said : " For what 
shall it profit a man, if he gain the whole 
world and lose his own life? " And right there 
is the crux of the whole matter. All the time 
spent in accumulating these things beyond the 
reasonable amount, is so much taken from 
the life from the things of the mind and the 
spirit. It is in the development and the pur- 
suit of these that all true satisfaction lies. 
Elemental law has so decreed. 

We have made wonderful progress, or rather 
have developed wonderful skill in connection 
with things. We need now to go back and 
catch up the thread and develop like skill in 
making the life. 



154 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 

Little wonder that brains are addled, that 
nerves are depleted, that nervous dyspepsia, 
that chronic weariness, are not the exception 
but rather the rule. Little wonder that sani- 
tariums are always full; that asylums are full 
and overflowing and still more to be built. 
No wonder that so many men, so many good 
men break and go to pieces, and so many lose 
the life here at from fifty to sixty years, when 
they should be in the very prime of life, in the 
full vigour of manhood ; at the very age when 
they are capable of enjoying life the most 
and are most capable of rendering the 
greatest service to their fellows, to their 
community, because of greater growth, ex- 
perience, means, and therefore leisure. Jesus 
was right What doth it profit? And think 
of the real riches that in the meantime are 
missed. 

It is like an addled-brain driver in making 
a trip across the continent. He is possessed, 
obsessed with the insane desire of making a 
record. He plunges on and on night and day, 
good weather and foul and all the time he is 
missing all the beauties, all the benefits to 
health and spirit along the way. He has none 
of these when he arrives he has missed them 
all. He has only the fact that he has made a 
record drive or nearly made one. And those 
with him he has not only robbed of the beau- 



HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 155 

ties along the way; but he has subjected 
them to all the discomforts along the way. 
And what really underlies the making of 
a record? It is primarily the spirit of 
vanity. 

When the mental beauties of life, when the 
spiritual verities are sacrificed by self-surren- 
der to and domination by the material, one of 
the heavy penalties that inexorable law im- 
poses is the drying up, so to speak, of the finer 
human perceptions the very faculties of en- 
joyment. It presents to the world many times, 
and all unconscious to himself, a stunted, 
shrivelled human being that eternal type that 
the Master had in mind when he said : " Thou 
fool, this night shall thy soul be required of 
thee." He whose sole employment or even 
whose primary employment becomes the build- 
ing of bigger and still bigger barns to take 
care of his accumulated grain, becomes in- 
capable of realising that life and the things 
that pertain to it are of infinitely more value 
than barns, or houses, or acres, or stocks, or 
bonds, or railroad ties. These all have their 
place, all are of value; but they can never be 
made the life. A recent poem by James Op- 
penheim presents a type that is known to 
nearly every one : * 

*"War and Laughter," by James Oppenheim 
The Century Company, New York. 



i S 6 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 

I heard the preacher preaching at the funeral: 
He moved the relatives to tears telling them 

of the father, husband, and friend that was 

dead: 

Of the sweet memories left behind him: 
Of a life that was good and kind. 

I happened to know the man, 
And I wondered whether the relatives would 
have wept if the preacher had told the truth : 
Let us say like this: 

"The only good thing this man ever did in his 
life, 

Was day before yesterday: 

He died . . . 

But he didn't even do that of his own voli- 
tion . . . 

He was the meanest man in business on Man- 
hattan Island, 

The most treacherous friend, the crudest and 
stingiest husband, 

And a father so hard that his children left 
home as soon as they were old enough . . . 

Of course he had divinity: everything human 
has: 

But he kept it so carefully hidden away that he 
might just as well not have had it ... 

" Wife ! good cheer ! now you can go your own 
way and live your own life! 



HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 157 

Children, give praise! you have his money: 
the only good thing he ever gave you . . . 

Friends! you have one less traitor to deal 
with . . . 

This is indeed a day of rejoicing and exulta- 
tion! 

Thank God this man is dead ! " 

An unknown enjoyment and profit to him 
is the world's great field of literature, the 
world's great thinkers, the inspirers of so 
many through all the ages. That splendid 
verse by Emily Dickinson means as much to 
him as it would to a dumb stolid ox: 

He ate and drank the precious words, 

His spirit grew robust, 
He knew no more that he was poor, 

Nor that his frame was dust; 
He danced along the dingy days, 

And this bequest of wings 
Was but a book ! What liberty 

A loosened spirit brings! 

Yes, life and its manifold possibilities of un- 
foldment and avenues of enjoyment life, and 
the things that pertain to it is an infinitely 
greater thing than the mere accessories of life. 

What infinite avenues of enjoyment, what 
peace of mind, what serenity of soul may be 



158 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 

the possession of all men and all women who 
are alive to the inner possibilities of life as por- 
trayed by our own prophet, Emerson, when 
he said: 

Oh, when I am safe in my sylvan home, 
I tread on the pride of Greece and Rome; 
And when I am stretched beneath the pines, 
Where the evening star so holy shines, 
I laugh at the lore and pride of man, 
At the Sophist schools and the learned clan; 
For what are they all in their high conceit, 
When man in the bush with God may meet? 

It was he who has exerted such a world-wide 
influence upon the minds and lives of men and 
women who also said : " Great men are they 
who see that spirituality is stronger than any 
material force: that thoughts rule the world." 
And this is true not only of the world in gen- 
eral, but it is true likewise in regard to the 
individual life. 

One of the great secrets of all successful 
living is unquestionably the striking of the 
right balance in life. The material has its 
place and a very important place. Fools in- 
deed were we to ignore or to attempt to ig- 
nore this fact. We cannot, however, except 
to our detriment, put the cart before the 
horse. Things may contribute to happiness, 



HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 159 

but things cannot bring happiness and sad 
indeed, and crippled and dwarfed and stunted 
becomes the life of every one who is not capa- 
ble of realising this fact. Eternally true in- 
deed is it that the life is more than meat and 
the body more than raiment. 

All life is from an inner centre outward. 
As within, so without. As we think we be- 
come. Which means simply this: our pre- 
vailing thoughts and emotions are never static, 
but dynamic. Thoughts are forces like cre- 
ates like, and like attracts like. It is therefore 
for us to choose whether we shall be inter- 
ested primarily in the great spiritual forces 
and powers of life, or whether we shall be in- 
terested solely in the material things of life. 

But there is a wonderful law which we must 
not lose sight of. It is to the effect that when 
we become sufficiently alive to the inner pow- 
ers and forces, to the inner springs of life, the 
material things of life will not only follow in a 
natural and healthy sequence, but they will 
also assume their right proportions. They will 
take their right places. 

It was the recognition of this great funda- 
mental fact of life that Jesus had in mind when 
he said: "But rather seek ye the kingdom of 
God; and all these things shall be added unto 
you," meaning, as he so distinctly stated, the 
kingdom of the mind and spirit made open and 



160 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 

translucent to the leading of the Divine Wis- 
dom inherent in the human soul, when that 
leading is sought and when through the right 
ordering of the mind we make the conditions 
whereby it may become operative in the in- 
dividual life. 

The great value of God as taught by Jesus 
is that God dwells in us. It is truly Emman- 
uel God with us. The law must be observed 
the conditions must be met. " The Lord is 
with you while ye be with him; and if ye will 
seek him, he will be found of you." " The 
spirit of the living God dwelleth in you." " If 
any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, 
that giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth 
not; and it shall be given him. But let him 
ask in faith, nothing wavering." That there 
is a Divine law underlying prayer that helps 
to release the inner springs of wisdom, which 
in turn leads to power, was well known to 
Jesus, for his life abundantly proved it. 

His great aptitude for the things of the spirit 
enabled him intuitively to realise this, to un- 
derstand it, to use it. And there was no mys- 
tery, no secret, no subterfuge on the part of 
Jesus as to the source of his power. In clear 
and unmistakable words he made it known 
and why should he not? It was the truth, 
the truth of this inner kingdom that would 
make men free that he came to reveal. " The 



HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 161 

words that I speak unto you I speak not of 
myself: but the Father that dwelleth in me, 
he doeth the works." " My Father worketh 
hitherto and I work. . . . For as the Father 
hath life in himself; so hath he given to the 
Son to have life in himself. ... I can of mine 
own self do nothing." As he followed the con- 
ditions whereby this higher illumination can 
come so must we. 

The injunction that Jesus gave in regard to 
prayer is unquestionably the method that he 
found so effective and that he himself used. 
How many times we are told that he withdrew 
to the mountain for his quiet period, for com- 
munion with the Father, that the realisation 
of his oneness with God might be preserved 
intact. In this continual realisation I and my 
Father are one lay his unusual insight and 
power. And his distinct statement which he 
made in speaking of his own powers as I am 
ye shall be shows clearly the possibilities of 
human unfoldment and attainment, since he 
realised and lived and then revealed the way. 

Were not this Divine source of wisdom and 
power the heritage of every human soul, dis- 
tinctly untrue then would be Jesus' saying: 
" For every one that asketh, receiveth ; and he 
that seeketh, findeth; and to him that knock- 
eth, it shall be opened." Infinitely better is it 
to know that one has this inner source of 



162 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 

guidance and wisdom which as he opens himself 
to it becomes continually more distinct, more 
clear and more unerring in its guidance, than 
to be continually seeking advice from outside 
sources, and being confused in regard to the 
advice given. This is unquestionably the way 
of the natural and the normal life, made so 
simple and so plain by Jesus, and that was 
foreshadowed by Isaiah when he said : " Hast 
thou not known? Hast thou not heard that 
the everlasting God, the Lord, the Creator of 
the ends of the earth fainteth not, neither is 
weary? He giveth power to the faint and to 
them that have no might he increaseth 
strength. Even the youths shall faint and be 
weary, and the young men shall utterly fall. 
But they that wait upon the Lord shall renew 
their strength; they shall mount up with 
wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be 
weary; they shall walk, and not faint." 

Not that problems and trials will not come. 
They will come. There never has been and 
there never will be a life free from them. Life 
isn't conceivable on any other terms. But the 
wonderful source of consolation and strength, 
the source that gives freedom from worry and 
freedom from fear is the realisation of the fact 
that the guiding force and the moulding power 
is within us. It becomes active and controll- 
ing in the degree that we realise and in the de- 



HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 163 

gree that we are able to open ourselves so 
that the Divine intelligence and power can 
speak to and can work through us. 

Judicious physical exercise induces greater 
bodily strength and vigour. An active and 
alert mental life, in other words mental ac- 
tivity, induces greater intellectual power. And 
under the same general law the same is true 
in regard to the development and the use of 
spiritual power. It, however, although the 
most important of all because it has to do more 
fundamentally with the life itself, we are most 
apt to neglect. The losses, moreover, result- 
ing from this neglect are almost beyond cal- 
culation. 

To establish one's centre aright is to make 
all of life's activities and events and results 
flow from this centre in orderly sequence. A 
modern writer of great insight has said : " The 
understanding that God is, and all there is, 
will establish you upon a foundation from 
which you can never be moved." To know 
that the power that is God is the power that 
works in us is knowledge of transcendent im- 
port. 

To know that the spirit of Infinite wisdom 
and power which is the creating, the moving, 
and the sustaining force in all life, thinks and 
acts in and through us as our own very life, 
in the degree that we consciously and delib- 



164 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 

erately desire it to become the guiding and the 
animating force in our lives, and open our- 
selves fully to its leadings, and follow its lead- 
ings, is to attain to that state of conscious 
oneness with the Divine that Jesus realised, 
lived and revealed, and that he taught as the 
method of the natural and the normal life for 
all men. 

We are so occupied with the matters of the 
sense-life that all unconsciously we become 
dominated, ruled by the things of the senses. 
Now in the real life there is the recognition 
of the fact that the springs of life are all 
from within, and that the inner always leads 
and rules the outer. Under the elemental law 
of Cause and Effect this is always done 
whether we are conscious of it or not. But 
the difference lies here: The master of life 
consciously and definitely allies himself in 
mind and spirit with the great central Force 
and rules his world from within. The creature 
of circumstances, through lack of desire or 
through weakness of will, fails to do this, and, 
lacking guiding and directing force, drifts and 
becomes thereby the creature of circumstance. 

One of deep insight has said : " That we do 
not spontaneously see and know God, as we 
see and know one another, and so manifest 
the God-nature as we do the sense-nature, is 
because that nature is yet latent, and in a 



HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 165 

sense slumbering within us. Yet the God- 
nature within us connects us as directly and 
vitally with the Being and Kingdom of God 
within, behind, and above the world, as does 
the sense-nature with the world external to us. 
Hence as the sense-consciousness was awak- 
ened and established by the recognition of and 
communication with the outward world 
through the senses, so the God-consciousness 
must be awakened by the corresponding recog- 
nition of, and communication with the Being 
and Kingdom of God through intuition the 
spiritual sense of the inner man. . . . Tke true 
prayer the prayer of silence is the only door 
that opens the soul to the direct revelation of 
God, and brings thereby the realisation of the 
God-nature in ourselves." 

As the keynote to the world of sense is 
activity, so the keynote to spiritual light and 
power is quiet. The individual consciousness 
must be brought into harmony with the Cos- 
mic consciousness. Paul speaks of the " sons 
of God." And in a single sentence he describes 
what he means by the term " For as many 
as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the 
sons of God." An older prophet has said: 
" The Lord in the midst of thee is mighty." 
Jesus with his deep insight perceived the iden- 
tity of his real life with the Divine life, the in- 
dwelling Wisdom and Power, the " Father 



166 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 

in me." The whole course of his ministry was 
his attempt " to show those who listened to 
him how he was related to the Father, and to 
teach them that they were related to the same 
Father in exactly the same way." 

There is that within man that is illumined 
and energised through the touch of His spirit. 
We can bring our minds into rapport, into such 
harmony and connection with the infinite Di- 
vine mind that it speaks in us, directs us, and 
therefore acts through us as our own selves. 
Through this connection we become illumined 
by Divine wisdom and we become energised 
by Divine power. It is ours, then, to act un- 
der the guidance of this higher wisdom and 
in all forms of expression to act and to work 
augmented by this higher power. The finite 
spirit, with all its limitations, becomes at its 
very centre in rapport with Infinite spirit, its 
Source. The finite thereby becomes the chan- 
nel through which the Infinite can and does 
work. 

To use an apt figure, it is the moving of the 
switch whereby we connect our wires as it 
were with the central dynamo which is the 
force that animates, that gives and sustains 
life in the universe. It is making actual the 
proposition that was enunciated by Emerson 
when he said : " Every soul is not only the 
inlet, but may become the outlet of all there 



HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 167 

is in God." Significant also in this connection 
is his statement : " The only sin is limitation." 
It is the actualising of the fact that in Him 
we live and move and have our being, with its 
inevitable resultant that we become " strong 
in the Lord and in the power of His might." 
There is perhaps no more valuable way of 
realising this end, than to adopt the practice 
of taking a period each day for being alone 
in the quiet, a half hour, even a quarter hour; 
stilling the bodily senses and making oneself 
receptive to the higher leadings of the spirit 
receptive to the impulses of the soul. This 
is following the master's practice and example 
of communion with the Father. Things in 
this universe and in human life do not happen. 
All is law and sequence. The elemental law 
of cause and effect is universal and unvarying. 
In the realm of spirit law is as definite as 
in the realm of mechanics in the realm of all 
material forces. 

If we would have the leading of the spirit, 
if we would perceive the higher intuitions and 
be led intuitively, bringing the affairs of the 
daily life thereby into the Divine sequence, we 
must observe the conditions whereby these 
leadings can come to us, and in time become 
habitual. 

The law of the spirit is quiet to be fol- 
lowed by action but quiet, the more readily 



168 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 

to come into a state of harmony with the In- 
finite Intelligence that works through us, and 
that leads us as our own intelligence when 
through desire and through will, we are able 
to bring our subconscious minds into such 
attunement that it can act through us, and we 
are able to catch its messages and follow its 
direction. But to listen and to observe the 
conditions whereby we can listen is essential. 

Jesus' own words as well as his practice 
apply here. After his admonition against 
public prayer, or prayer for show, or prayer 
of much speaking, he said : " But thou, when 
thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when 
thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father 
which is in secret ; and thy Father which seeth 
in secret, shall reward thee openly." Now 
there are millions of men, women, and chil- 
dren in the world who have no closets. There 
are great numbers of others who have no 
access to them sometimes for days, or weeks, 
or months at a time. It is evident, therefore, 
that in the word that has been rendered closet 
he meant enter into the quiet recesses of 
your own soul that you may thus hold com- 
munion with the Father. 

Now the value of prayer is not that God 
will change or order any laws or forces to 
suit the numerous and necessarily the diverse 
petitions of any. All things are through law, 



HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 169 

and law is fixed and inexorable. The value of 
prayer, of true prayer, is that through it one 
can so harmonise his life with the Divine 
order that intuitive perceptions of truth and 
a greater perception and knowledge of law 
becomes his possession. As has been said by 
an able contemporary thinker and writer: 
" We cannot form a passably thorough notion 
of man without saturating it through and 
through with the idea of a cosmic inflow from 
outside his world life the inflow of God. 
Without a large consciousness of the universe 
beyond our knowledge, few men, if any, have 
done great things.* 

I shall always remember with great pleasure 
and profit a call a few days ago from Dr. 
Edward Emerson of Concord, Emerson's 
eldest son. Happily I asked him in regard 
to his father's methods of work if he had any 
regular methods. He replied in substance: 
" It was my father's custom to go daily to the 
woods to listen. He would remain there an 
hour or more in order to get whatever there 
might be for him that day. He would then 
come home and write into a little book his 
' day-book ' what he had gotten. Later on 
when it came time to write a book, he would 
transcribe from this, in their proper sequence 
and with their proper connections, these en- 

* Henry Holt in "Cosmic Relations." 



170 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 

trances of the preceding weeks or months. 
The completed book became virtually a ledger 
formed or posted from his day-books." 

The prophet is he who so orders his life that 
he can adequately listen to the voice, the 
revelations of the over soul, and who truthfully 
transcribes what he hears or senses. He is 
not a follower of custom or of tradition. He 
can never become and can never be made the 
subservient tool of an organisation. His aim 
and his mission is rather to free men from 
ignorance, superstition, credulity, from half 
truths, by leading them into a continually 
larger understanding of truth, of law and 
therefore of righteousness. 

It was more than a mere poetic idea that 
Lowell gave utterance to when he said: 

The thing we long for, that we are 
For one transcendent moment. 

To establish this connection, to actualise 
this God-consciousness, that it may not be for 
one transcendent moment, but that it may be- 
come constant and habitual, so that every 
thought arises, and so that every act goes 
forth from this centre, is the greatest good that 
can come into the possession of man. There is 
nothing greater. It is none other than the 
realisation of Jesus' injunction " Seek ye first 



HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 171 

the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, 
and all these things shall be added unto you." 
It is then that he said Do not worry about 
your life. Your mind and your will are under 
the guidance of the Divine mind; your every 
act goes out under this direction and all things 
pertaining to your life will fall into their proper 
places. Therefore do not worry about your 
life. 

When a man finds his centre, when he be- 
comes centred in the Infinite, then redemption 
takes place. He is redeemed from the bond- 
age of the senses. He lives thereafter under 
the guidance of the spirit, and this is salvation. 
It is a new life that he has entered into. He 
lives in a new world, because his outlook is 
entirely new. He is living now in the King- 
dom of Heaven. Heaven means harmony. 
He has brought his own personal mind and 
life into harmony with the Divine mind and 
life. He becomes a coworker with God. 

It is through such men and women that 
God's plans and purposes are carried out. 
They not only hear but they interpret for 
others God's voice. They are the prophets of 
our time and the prophets of all time. They 
are doing God's work in the world, and in so 
doing they are finding their own supreme sat- 
isfaction and happiness. They are not looking 
forward to the Eternal life. They realise that 



172 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 

they are *iow in the Eternal life, and that there 
is no such thing as eternal life if this life that 
we are now in is not it. When the time comes 
for them to stop their labours here, they look 
forward without fear and with anticipation to 
the change, the transition to the other form 
of life but not to any other life. The words 
of Whitman embody a spirit of anticipation 
and of adventure for them: 

Joy, Shipmate, joy! 
(Pleas'd to my soul at death I cry) 
One life is closed, one life begun, 
The long, long anchorage we leave, 
The ship is clear at last, she leaps. 

Joy, Shipmate, joy! 

They have an abiding faith that they will 
take up the other form of life exactly where 
they left it off here. Being in heaven now 
they will be in heaven when they awake to the 
continuing beauties of the life subsequent to 
their transition. Such we might also say is 
the teaching of Jesus regarding the highest 
there is in life here and the best there is in the 
life hereafter. 



XI 



SOME METHODS OF EXPRESSION 

The life of the Spirit, or, in other words, 
the true religious life, is not a life of mere 
contemplation or a life of inactivity. As 
Fichte, in "The Way Toward the Blessed 
Life," has said : " True religion, notwithstand- 
ing that it raises the view of those who are in- 
spired by it to its own region, nevertheless, 
retains their Life firmly in the domain of ac- 
tion, and of right moral action. . . . Religion 
is not a business by and for itself which a 
man may practise apart from his other occupa- 
tions, perhaps on certain fixed days and hours ; 
but it is the inmost spirit that penetrates, in- 
spires, and pervades all our Thought and Ac- 
tion, which in other respects pursue their ap- 
pointed course without change or interruption. 
That the Divine Life and Energy actually lives 
in us is inseparable from Religion." 

How thoroughly this is in keeping with the 

thought of the highly illumined seer, Sweden- 

borg, is indicated when he says : " The Lord's 

Kingdom is a Kingdom of ends and uses." 

173 



174 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 

And again : " Forsaking the world means lov- 
ing God and the neighbour; and God is loved 
when a man lives according to His command- 
ments, and the neighbour is loved when a man 
performs uses." And still again : " To be of 
use means to desire the welfare of others for 
the sake of the common good; and not to be 
of use means to desire the welfare of others 
not for the sake of the common good but for 
one's own sake. ... In order that man may 
receive heavenly life he must live in the world 
and engage in its business and occupations, 
and thus by a moral and civil life acquire spir- 
itual life. In no other way can spiritual life 
be generated in man, or his spirit be prepared 
for heaven." 

We hear much today both in various writ- 
ings and in public utterances of " the spiritual " 
and " the spiritual life." I am sure that to 
the great majority of men and women the term 
spiritual, or better, the spiritual life, means 
something, but something by no means fully 
tangible or clear-cut. I shall be glad indeed 
if I am able to suggest a more comprehensible 
concept of it, or putting it in another form 
and better perhaps, to present a more clear- 
cut portraiture of the spiritual life in expres- 
sion in action. 

And first let us note that in the mind and in 
the teachings of Jesus there is no such thing as 



HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 175 

the secular life and the religious life. His 
ministry pertained to every phase of life. The 
truth that he taught was a truth that was to 
permeate every thought and every act of life. 

We make our arbitrary divisions. We are 
too apt to deny the fact that the Lord is the 
Lord of the week-day, the same as He is the 
Lord of the Sabbath. Jesus refused to be 
bound by any such consideration. He taught 
that every act that is a good act, every act 
that is of service to mankind is not only 
a legitimate act to be done on the Sabbath 
day, but an act that should be performed on 
the Sabbath day. And any act that is not 
right and legitimate for the Sabbath day is 
neither right nor legitimate for the week-day. 
In other words, it is the spirit of righteousness 
that must permeate and must govern every act 
of life and every moment of life. 

In seeking to define the spiritual life, it were 
better to regard the world as the expression 
of the Divine mind. The spirit is the life ; the 
world and all things in it, the material to be 
moulded, raised, and transmuted from the 
lower to the higher. This is indeed the law of 
evolution, that has been through all the ages 
and that today is at work. It is the God-Power 
that is at work and every form of useful ac- 
tivity that helps on with this process of lifting 
and bettering is a form of Divine activity. 



176 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 

If therefore we recognise the one Divine 
life working in and through all, the animating 
force, therefore the Life of all, and if we are 
consciously helping in this process we are 
spiritual men. 

No man of intelligence can fail to recog- 
nise the fact that life is more important 
than things. Life is the chief thing, and 
material things are the elements that min- 
ister to, that serve the purposes of the life, 
Whoever does anything in the world to pre- 
serve life, to better its conditions, who, recog- 
nising the Divine force at work lifting life up 
always to better, finer conditions, is doing 
God's work in the world because cooperating 
with the great Cosmic world plan. 

The ideal, then, is men and women of the 
spirit, open and responsive always to its guid- 
ance, recognising the Divine plan and the 
Divine ideal, working cooperatively in the 
world to make all conditions of life fairer, 
finer, more happy. He who lives and works 
not as an individual, that is not for his good 
alone, but who recognises the essential oneness 
of life is carrying out his share of the Divine 
plan. 

A man may be unusually gifted ; he may have 
unusual ability in business, in administration; 
he may be a giant in finance, in administration, 
ibut if for self alone, if lack of vision blinds 



him to the great Divine plan, if he does not 
recognise his relative place and value; if he 
gains his purposes by selfishness, by climbing 
over others, by indifference to human pain or 
suffering oblivious to human welfare his 
ways are the ways of the jungle. His mind 
and his life are purely sordid, grossly and 
blindly self-centred wholly material. He 
gains his object, but by Divine law not happi- 
ness, not satisfaction, not peace. He is outside 
the Kingdom of Heaven the kingdom of har- 
mony. He is living and working out of har- 
mony with the Divine mind that is evolving 
a higher order of life in the world. He is 
blind too, he is working against the Divine 
plan. 

Now what is the Divine call? Can he be 
made into a spiritual man? Yes. A different 
understanding, a different motive, a different 
object then will follow a difference in 
methods. Instead of self alone he will have a 
sense of, he will have a call to service. And 
this man, formerly a hinderer in the Divine 
plan, becomes a spiritual giant. His splendid 
powers and his qualities do not need to be 
changed. Merely his motives and thereby his 
methods, and he is changed into a giant engine 
of righteousness. He is a part of the great 
world force and plan. He is doing his part 
in the great world work he is a coworker 



178 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 

with God. And here lies salvation. Saved 
from self and the dwarfed and stunted condi- 
tion that will follow, his spiritual nature un- 
folds and envelops his entire life. His powers 
and his wealth are thereafter to bless mankind. 
But behold ! by another great fundamental law 
of life in doing this he is blessed ten, a hun- 
dred, a millionfold. 

Material prosperity is or may become a true 
jjain, a veritable blessing. But it can become 
a curse to the world and still more to its pos- 
sessor when made an end in itself, and at the 
expense of all the higher attributes and powers 
of human life. 

We have reason to rejoice that a great 
change of estimate has not only begun but is 
now rapidly creeping over the world. He of 
even a generation ago who piled and piled, but 
who remained ignorant of the more funda- 
mental laws of life, blind to the law of mu- 
tuality and service, would be regarded today 
as a low, beastly type. I speak advisedly. It 
is this obedience to the life of the spirit that 
Whitman had in mind when he said : " And 
whoever walks a furlong without sympathy 
walks to his own funeral drest in his shroud." 
It was the full flowering of the law of mu- 
tuality and service that he saw when he said: 
" I saw a city invincible to the attacks of 
the whole of the rest of the earth. I dream'd 



HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 179 

that it was the new City of Friends. Nothing 
was greater there than the quality of robust 
love; it led the rest. It was seen every hour 
in the actions of the men of that city and in 
all their looks and words." It is through 
obedience to this life of the spirit that order 
is brought out of chaos in the life of the 
individual and in the life of the community, 
in the business world, the labour world, and 
in our great world relations. 

But in either case, we men and women of 
Christendom, to be a Christian is not only to 
be good, but to be good for something. Ac- 
cording to the teachings of the Master true 
religion is not only personal salvation, but it 
is giving one's self through all of one's best 
efforts to actualise the Kingdom of Heaven 
here on earth. The finding of the Kingdom 
is not only personal but social and world- 
affirming and in the degree that it becomes 
fully and vitally personal will it become so. 

A man who is not right with his fellow-men 
is not right and cannot be right with God. 
This is coming to be the clear-cut realisa- 
tion of all progressive religious thought today. 
Since men are free from the trammels of an 
enervating dogma that through fear made 
them seek, or rather that made them contented 
with religion as primarily a system of rewards 
and punishments, they are now awakening to 



i8o HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 

the fact that the logical carrying out of Jesus' 
teaching of the Kingdom is the establishing 
here on this earth of an order of life and hence 
of a society where greater love and coopera- 
tion and justice prevail. Our rapidly growing 
present-day conception of Christianity makes 
it not world-renouncing, but world-affirming. 

This modern conception of the function of a 
true and vital Christianity makes it the task 
of the immediate future to apply Christianity 
to trade, to commerce, to labour relations, to 
all social relations, to international relations. 
" And, in the wider field of religious thought," 
says a writer in a great international religious 
paper, " what truer service can we render than 
to strip theology of all that is unreal or need- 
lessly perplexing, and make it speak plainly 
and humanly to people who have their duty to 
do and their battle to fight? " It makes in- 
telligent, sympathetic, and helpful living take 
the place of the tooth and the claw, the growl 
and the deadly hiss of the jungle all right in 
their places, but with no place in human 
living. 

The growing realisation of the interde- 
pendence of all life is giving a new standard 
of action and attainment, and a new standard 
of estimate. Jesus' criterion is coming into 
more universal appreciation: He that is great- 
est among you shall be as he who serves. 



HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 181 

Through this fundamental law of life there 
are responsibilities that cannot be evaded or 
shirked and of him to whom much is given 
much is required. 

It was President Wilson who recently said: 
" It is to be hoped that these obvious truths 
will come to more general acceptance; that 
honest business will quit thinking that it is 
attacked when loaded-dice business is at- 
tacked ; that the mutuality of interest between 
employer and employee will receive ungrudg- 
ing admission ; and, finally, that men of affairs 
will lend themselves more patriotically to the 
work of making democracy an efficient instru- 
ment for the promotion of human welfare. It 
cannot be said that they have done so in the 
past. ... As a consequence, many necessary 
things have been done less perfectly without 
their assistance that could have been done 
more perfectly with their expert aid." He is 
by no means alone in recognising this fact. 
Nor is he at all blind to the great change that 
is already taking place. 

In a recent public address in New York, the 
head of one of the largest plants in the world, 
and who starting with nothing has accumu- 
lated a fortune of many millions, said : " The 
only thing I am proud of prouder of than 
that I have amassed a great fortune is that 
I established the first manual training school 



182 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 

in Pennsylvania. The greatest delight of my 
life is to see the advancement of the young 
men who have come up about me." 

This growing sense of personal responsi- 
bility, and still better, of personal interest, this 
giving of one's abilities and one's time, in 
addition to one's means, is the beginning of the 
fulfilment of what I have long thought: 
namely, the great gain that will accrue to 
numberless communities and to the nation, 
when men of great means, men of great busi- 
ness and executive ability, give of their time 
and their abilities for the accomplishment of 
those things for the public welfare that other- 
wise would remain undone, or that would re- 
main unduly delayed. What a gain will re- 
sult also to those who so do in the joy and 
satisfaction resulting from this higher type of 
accomplishment hallowed by the undying ele- 
ment of human service ! 

You keep silent too much. " Have great 
leaders, and the rest will follow," said Whit- 
man. The gift of your abilities while you live 
would be of priceless worth for the establishing 
and the maintenance of a fairer, a healthier, 
and a sweeter life in your community, your 
city, your country. It were better to do this 
and to be contented with a smaller accumula- 
tion than to have it so large or even so exces- 
sive, and when the summons comes to leave 



HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 183 

it to two or three or to half a dozen who can- 
not possibly have good use for it all, and some 
of whom perchance would be far better off 
without it, or without so much. By so doing 
you would be leaving something still greater 
to them as well as to hundreds or thousands of 
others. 

Significant in this connection are these words 
by a man of wealth and of great public serv- 
ice: * 

" On the whole, the individualistic age has 
not been a success, either for the individual, or 
the community in which he has lived, or the 
nation. We are, beyond question, entering on 
a period where the welfare of the community 
takes precedence over the interests of the in- 
dividual and where the liberty of the individ- 
ual will be more and more circumscribed for 
the benefit of the community as a whole. 
Man's activities will hereafter be required to 
be not only for himself but for his fellow-men. 
To my mind there is nothing in the signs of 
the times so certain as this. 

" The man of exceptional ability, of more 
than ordinary talent, will hereafter look for 
his rewards, for his honours, not in one direc- 

* From a notable article in the New York " Times 
Magazine," Sunday, April i, 1917, by George W. 
Perkins, chairman Mayor's Food Supply Commis- 
sion. 



i84 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 

tion but in two first, and foremost, in some 
public work accomplished, and, secondarily, in 
wealth acquired. In place of having it said of 
him at his death that he left so many hundred 
thousand dollars it will be said that he ren- 
dered a certain amount of public service, and, 
incidentally, left a certain amount of money. 
Such a goal will prove a far greater satisfac- 
tion to him, he will live a more rational, worth- 
while life, and he will be doing his share to 
provide a better country in which to live. We 
face new conditions, and in order to survive 
and succeed we shall require a different spirit 
of public service." 

I am well aware of the fact that the mere 
accumulation of wealth is not, except in very 
rare cases, the controlling motive in the lives 
of our wealthy men of affairs. It is rather 
the joy and the satisfaction of achievement. 
But nevertheless it is possible, as has so often 
proved, to get so much into a habit and 
thereby into a rut, that one becomes a victim 
of habit ; and the life with all its superb possi- 
bilities of human service, and therefore of true 
greatness, becomes side-tracked and abortive. 

There are so many different lines of activity 
for human betterment for children, for men 
and women, that those of great executive and 
financial ability have wonderful opportunities. 
Greatness conies always through human serv- 



HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 185 

ice. As there is no such thing as finding 
happiness by searching for it directly, so there 
is no such thing as achieving greatness by 
seeking it directly. It comes not primarily 
through brilliant intellect, great talents, but 
primarily through the heart. It is determined 
by the way that brilliant intellect, great talents 
are used. It is accorded not to those who seek 
it directly. By an indirect law it is accorded 
to those who, forgetting self, give and thereby 
lose their lives in human service. 

Both poet and prophet is Edwin Markham 
when he says: 

We men of earth have here the stuff 
Of Paradise we have enough! 
We need no other stones to build 
The stairs into the Unfulfilled 
No other ivory for the doors 
No other marble for the floors 
No other cedar for the beam 
And dome of man's immortal dream. 

Here on the paths of every day 
Here on the common human way, 
Is all the stuff the gods would take 
To build a Heaven ; to mould and make 
New Edens. Ours the stuff sublime 
To build Eternity in timel 



i86 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 

This putting of divinity into life and raising 
thereby an otherwise sordid life up to higher 
levels and thereby to greater enjoyments, is 
the power that is possessed equally by those 
of station and means, and by those in the more 
humble or even more lowly walks of life. 

When your life is thus touched by the spirit 
of God, when it is ruled by this inner King- 
dom, when your constant prayer, as the prayer 
of every truly religious man or woman will be 
Lord, what wilt Thou have me to do? My 
one desire is that Thy will be my will, and 
therefore that Thy will be done in me and 
through me then you are living the Divine 
life; you are a coworker with God. And 
whether your life according to accepted stand- 
ards be noted or humble it makes no difference 
you are fulfilling your Divine mission. You 
should be, you cannot help being fearless and 
happy. You are a part of the great creative 
force in the world. 

You are doing a man's or a woman's work 
in the world, and in so doing you are not un- 
important; you are essential. The joy of true 
accomplishment is yours. You can look for- 
ward always with sublime courage and ex- 
pectancy. The life of the most humble can 
thus become an exalted life. Mother, watching 
over, cleaning, feeding, training, and educating 
your brood ; seamstress, working, with a touch 



HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 187 

of the Divine in all you do it must be done 
by some one allow it to be done by none 
better than by you. Farmer, tilling your soil, 
gathering your crops, caring for your herds; 
you are helping feed the world. There is 
nothing more important. 

" Who digs a well, or plants a seed, 

A sacred pact he keeps with sun and sod; 
With these he helps refresh and feed 

The world, and enters partnership with 
God." 

If you do not allow yourself to become a 
slave to your work, and if you cooperate 
within the house and the home so that your 
wife and your daughters do not become slaves 
or near-slaves, what an opportunity is yours 
of high thinking and noble living! The more 
intelligent you become, the better read, the 
greater the interest you take in community and 
public affairs, the more effectively you be- 
come what in reality and jointly you are the 
backbone of this and of every nation. Teacher, 
poet, dramatist, carpenter, ironworker, clerk, 
college head*, Mayor, Governor, President, 
Ruler the effectiveness of your work and the 
satisfaction in your work will be determined 
by the way in which you relate your thought 
and your work to the Divine plan, and co- 



i88 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 

ordinate your every activity in reference to the 
highest welfare of the greater whole. 

However dimly or clearly we may perceive 
it great changes are taking place. The simple, 
direct teachings of the Christ are reaching 
more and more the mind, are stirring the heart 
and through these are dominating the actions 
of increasing numbers of men and women. 
The realisation of the mutual interdependence 
of the human family, the realisation of its com- 
mon source, and that when one part of it goes 
wrong all suffer thereby, the same as when 
any portion of it advances all are lifted and 
benefited thereby, makes us more eager for 
the more speedy actualising of the Kingdom 
that the Master revealed and portrayed. 

It was Sir Oliver Lodge who in this con- 
nection recently said : " Those who think that 
the day of the Messiah is over are strangely 
mistaken; it has hardly begun. In individual 
souls Christianity has flourished and borne 
fruit, but for the ills of the world itself it is 
an almost untried panacea. It will be strange 
if this ghastly war fosters and simplifies and 
improves a knowledge of Christ, and aids a 
perception of the ineffable beauty of his life 
and teaching; yet stranger things have hap- 
pened, and whatever the churches may do, I 
believe that the call of Christ himself will be 
heard and attended to by a larger part of hu- 



HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 189 

manity in the near future, as never yet it has 
been heard or attended to on earth." 

The simple message of the Christ, with its 
twofold injunction of Love, is, when suffi- 
ciently understood and sufficiently heeded, all 
that we men of earth need to lift up, to beau- 
tify, to make strong and Godlike individual 
lives and thereby and of necessity the life of 
the world. Jesus never taught that God in- 
carnated Himself in him alone. I challenge 
any man living to find any such teach- 
ing by him. He did proclaim his own unique 
realisation of God. Intuitively and vividly he 
perceived the Divine life, the eternal Word, the 
eternal Christ, manifesting in his clean, strong, 
upright soul, so that the young Jewish rabbi 
and prophet, known in all his community as 
Jesus, the son of Joseph and Mary and whose 
brothers and sisters they knew so well,* be- 
came the firstborn fully born <>f the Father. 

He then pleaded with all the energy and 
love and fervour of his splendid heart and 
vigorous manhood that all men should follow 
the Way that he revealed and realise their 
Divine Sonship, that their lives might be re- 
deemed redeemed from the bondage of^ the 

* Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary, the 
brother of James, and Joses, and of Juda, and 
Simon? And are his sisters not here with us? 
Mark 6:3. 



igo HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 

bodily senses and the bondage of merely the 
things of the outer world, and saved as fit sub- 
jects of and workers in the Father's Kingdom. 
Otherwise for millions of splendid earnest men 
and women today his life-message would have 
no meaning. 

To make men awake to their real identity, 
and therefore to their possibilities and powers 
as true sons of God, the Father of all, and 
therefore that all men are brothers for other- 
wise God is not Father of all and to live to- 
gether in brotherly love and mutual coopera- 
tion whereby the Divine will becomes done on 
earth as it is in heaven this is his message to 
we men of earth. If we believe his message 
and accept his leadership, then he becomes in- 
deed our elder brother who leads the way, the 
Word in us becomes flesh, the Christ becomes 
enthroned in our lives, and we become co- 
workers with him in the Father's vineyard. 



XII 



THE WORLD WAR ITS MEANING AND ITS 
LESSONS FOR US 

Whatever differences of opinion and honest 
differences of opinion may have existed and 
may still exist in America in regard to the 
great world conflict, there is a wonderful 
unanimity of thought that has crystallised 
itself into the concrete form something must 
be done in order that it can never occur again. 
The higher intelligence of the nation must 
assert itself. It must feel and think and act 
in terms of internationalism. Not that the 
feeling of nationalism in any country shall, or 
even can be eradicated or even abated. It 
must be made, however, to coordinate itself 
with the now rapidly growing sense of world- 
consciousness, that the growing intelligence 
of mankind, aided by some tremendously con- 
crete forms of recent experience, is now r> ecog- 
nising as a great reality. 

That there have been strong sympathies for 

both the Allied Nations and for the Central 

Powers in their titanic conflict, goes without 

saying. How could it be otherwise, when we 

191 



iQ2 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 

realise the diverse and complex types of our 
citizenship ? 

One of the most distinctive, and in some 
ways one of the most significant, features of 
the American nation is that it is today com- 
posed of representatives, and in some cases, of 
enormous bodies of representatives, number- 
ing into the millions, of practically every na- 
tion in the world. 

There are single cities where, in one case 
twenty-six, in another case twenty-nine, and 
in other cases a still larger number of what 
are today designated as hyphenated citizens 
are represented. The orderly removal of the 
hyphen, and the amalgamation of these splen- 
did representatives of practically all nations 
into genuine American citizens, infused with 
American ideals and pushed on by true Ameri- 
can ambitions, is one of the great problems 
that the war has brought in a most striking 
manner to our attention. 

Not that these representatives of many 
nations shall in any way lose their sense of 
sympathy for the nations of their birth, in 
times of either peace or of distress, although 
they have found it either advisable or greatly 
to their own personal advantage and welfare 
to leave the lands of their birth and to estab- 
lish their homes here. 

The fact that in the vast majority of cases 



HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 193 

they find themselves better off here, and choose 
to remain and assume the responsibilities of 
citizenship in the Western Republic, involves 
a responsibility that some, if not indeed many, 
heretofore have apparently too lightly con- 
sidered. There must be a more supreme sense 
of allegiance, and a continually growing sense 
of responsibility to the nation, that, guided by 
their own independent judgment and animated 
by their own free wills, they have chosen as 
their home. 

There is a difference between sympathy and 
allegiance ; and unless a man has found con- 
ditions intolerable in the land of his birth, 
and this is the reason for his seeking a home in 
another land more to his liking and to his ad- 
vantage, we cannot expect him to be devoid 
of sympathy for the land of his birth, especially 
in times of stress or of great need. We can 
expect him, however, and we have a right to 
demand his absolute allegiance to the land of 
his adoption. And if he cannot give this, then 
we should see to it that he return to his former 
home. If he is capable of clear thinking and 
right feeling, he also must realise the funda- 
mental truth of this fact. 

The time has now arrived when the great 
mass of American people, including vast num- 
bers of foreign birth, or children of those of 
foreign birth, realise the grave dangers to 



194 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 

American institutions, and to the very nation 
itself, in any hyphenated citizenship. There 
will, moreover, be an insistent demand that 
those who of their own choice choose to live 
here, realise the duty of their supreme alle- 
giance to one nation and if they cannot give 
this, that they then ~be compelled to get out. 

There are public schools in America where 
as many as nineteen languages are spoken in 
a single room. Our public schools, so eagerly 
sought by the children of parents of foreign 
birth, in their intense eagerness for an educa- 
tion that is offered freely and without cost to 
all, can and must be made greater instruments 
in converting what must in time become a 
great menace to our institutions, and even to 
the very life of the nation itself, into a real and 
genuine American citizenship. Our best edu- 
cators, in addition to our clearest thinking 
citizens, are realising as never before, that our 
public-school system chiefly, among our edu- 
cational institutions, must be made a great 
melting-pot through which this process of 
amalgamation must be carried on. 

We are also realising clearly now that, as a 
nation, we have been entirely too lax in con- 
nection with our immigration privileges, regu- 
lations, and restrictions. We have been ad- 
mitting foreigners to our shores in such enor- 
mous quantities each year that we have not 



HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 195 

been able at all adequately to assimilate them, 
nor have we used at all a sufficiently wise dis- 
crimination in the admission of desirables or 
undesirables. 

We have received, or we have allowed to be 
dumped upon our shores, great numbers of the 
latter whom we should know would inevitably 
become dependents, as well as great numbers 
of criminals. The result has been that they have 
been costing certain localities millions of dol- 
lars every year. But entirely aside from the 
latter, the last two or three years have brought 
home to us as never before the fact that those 
who come to our shores must come with the 
avowed and the settled purpose of becoming 
real American citizens, giving full and abso- 
lute allegiance to the institutions, the laws, 
the government of the land of their adop- 
tion. 

If any other government is not able so to 
manage as to make it more desirable for its 
subjects to remain in the land of their birth, 
rather than to seek homes in the land with in- 
stitutions more to their liking, or with ad- 
vantages more conducive to their welfare, that 
government then should not expect to retain, 
even in the slightest degree, the allegiance of 
such former subjects. A hyphenated citizen- 
ship may become as dangerous to a republic 
as a cancer is in the human body. A country 



ig6 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 

with over a hundred hyphens cannot fulfil its 
highest destiny. 

The war has brought home to us as never 
before also this tremendous fact. While of 
late years there has been in America a tre- 
mendous growth and quickening of thought 
along the lines of internationalism, now rapidly 
crystallising itself into the form of a World 
Federation for the enforcement of peace and 
a World Court for the arbitrament of all na- 
tional differences that cannot be readily settled 
by the nations involved, the war has brought 
us as a people face to face with another great 
fact. It is this: During the last several years 
things have occurred, great forces have broken 
forth that we and all peace-loving people 
throughout the world thought well-nigh im- 
possible. Treaties have been broken, inter- 
national law has been strained, snapped, and 
scrapped. The sovereign rights of neutral 
nations have been violated. 

Grim war has been thrust across their very 
borders. One after another, neutral nations 
have had their trade, their industries, their 
commerce, interfered with, and in many cases 
even utterly demoralised. Great amounts of 
property have been destroyed, and numbers 
of lives have been lost to them through the 
grim, relentless tragedy of war which they 
have had no hand in the making. 



HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 197 

We, as a nation, have been rudely shaken 
from our long dream of almost inevitable 
national security. We have been brought 
finally, and although as a nation we have no 
desire for conquest or empire, and no desire 
for military glory, and therefore no need of 
any great army or navy for offensive purposes, 
we have been brought finally to realise that we 
do, nevertheless, stand in need of a national 
strengthening of our arm of defence. A land 
of a hundred million people, where one could 
travel many times for a sixmonth and never 
see the sign of a soldier, is brought, though 
reluctantly, to face a new state of affairs ; but 
one, nevertheless, that must be faced calmly 
faced and wisely acted upon. And while it is 
true that as a nation we have always had the 
tradition of non-militarism, it is not true that 
we have had the tradition of military or of 
naval impotence or weakness. 

Preparedness, therefore, has assumed a posi- 
tion of tremendous importance, in individual 
thought, in public discussion, and almost uni- 
versally in the columns of the public press. 
One of the most vital questions among us 
today is, not so much as to how we shall pre- 
pare, but how shall we prepare adequately for 
defensive purposes, in case of any emergency 
arising, without being thrown too far along 
the road of militarism, and without an in- 



ig8 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 

ordinate preparation that has been the scourge 
and the bane of many old-world countries for 
so many years, and that quite as much as any- 
thing has been provocative of that horrible 
conflict that has literally been devastating so 
many European countries. 

It is clearly apparent that the best thought 
in America today calls for an adequate prepa- 
ration for purposes of defence, and calls for a 
recognition of facts as they are. It also clearly 
sees the danger of certain types of mind and 
certain interests combining to carry the matter 
much farther than is at all called for. The 
question is How shall we then strike that 
happy balance that is the secret of all suc- 
cessful living in the lives of either individ- 
uals or in the lives of nations? 

All clear-seeing people realise that, as things 
are in the world today, there is a certain 
amount of preparedness that is necessary for 
influence and for insurance. As within the 
nation a police force is necessary for the en- 
forcement of law, for the preservation of law 
and order, although it is not at all necessary 
that every second or third man be a policeman, 
so in the council of nations the individual 
nation must have a certain element of force 
that it can fall back upon if all other available 
agencies fail. In diplomacy the strong nations 
win out, the weaker lose out. Military and 



HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 199 

naval power, unless carried to a ridiculous 
excess does not, therefore, lie idle, even when 
not in actual use. 

Our power and influence as a nation will 
certainly not be in proportion to our weak- 
ness. Although righteousness exalteth a 
nation, it is nevertheless true that righteous- 
ness alone will not protect a nation while 
other nations are fully armed. National weak- 
ness does not make for peace. 

Righteousness, combined with a spirit of 
forbearance, combined with a keen desire to 
give justice as well as to demand justice, if 
combined with the power to strike powerfully 
and sustainedly in defence of justice, and in 
defence of national integrity, is what protects 
a nation, and this it is that in the long run 
exalteth a nation while things are as they are. 

While conditions have therefore brought 
prominently to the forefront in America the 
matter of military training and military serv- 
ice an adequate military preparation for pur- 
poses of defence, for full and adequate defence, 
the best thought of the nation is almost a unit 
in the belief that, for us as a nation, an im- 
mense standing army is unnecessary as well 
as inadvisable. 

It is a grave question in the minds of most 
people, however, as to whether it should be 
introduced into our public schools. To do so 



200 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 

is to change almost overnight, so to speak, 
one of our most cherished American ideals. It 
is the fundamental ideal of living on terms of 
peace and good will with all nations and re- 
placing it with the ideal, military training. 
Were the same time given to a more thorough 
teaching of civics, thereby inculcating a far 
greater acquaintanceship with, and working 
knowledge of American institutions, political 
methods, and political ideals, we would in the 
long run be stronger as a nation, even in times 
of any great crisis. Especially is this true of 
the tremendous foreign element, continually 
increasing, that we have in our public schools 
throughout almost the entire country. 

Let the military training come later, at a 
more responsible age, and in a more systematic 
manner. Let it be given by those fully com- 
petent to give it. Let it be wholly under Fed- 
eral control and let it be universal, beginning 
at the age of eighteen and continuing to the 
age of twenty-one. Let every youth in the 
land then be required to be in attendance in 
the training camp three months in the summer, 
each summer, during these three years. 

Let them there be given systematic military 
training, combined with physical training, 
hikes for endurance, training in hygiene, and 
additional instruction in civics, inculcating 
thereby not only a fuller sense of responsi- 



HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 201 

bility for the welfare and the safety of their 
country in times of danger, but the still greater 
and more needed responsibility of a citizen in 
taking an intelligent and an efficient interest 
in matters of government in times of peace, 
and then the readiness to spring forth instantly 
for service in case of any call for her defence. 
Let the right of franchise or the beginning 
of voting, the assumption of full citizenship 
be dependent upon the ability to pass satis- 
factory tests along all these lines, which in 
hundreds of thousands of cases will make 
citizenship and suffrage mean something, 
where in the commonplace manner in which it 
is assumed today it means but little in all too 
many cases. 

In this way also can real American citizens 
be made out of the children of the vast num- 
bers of foreigners that come annually to our 
shores. In this way, also, under the guidance 
of trained and well-equipped instructors and 
leaders, can we amalgamate and build up a 
true, a safe, and a sane American spirit. To 
put military training in our schools, to put 
wooden guns into the hands of school children, 
is as consummately silly as it is foolhardy and 
unnecessary. Let a wisely wrought out and a 
standardised system of physical training be 
introduced and systematically followed, be- 
ginning at the age of eight and continuing 



202 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 

right through public, and high, and private 
school. 

Then when the age of eighteen years is 
reached our young men would be prepared to 
go into our national training camps and ac- 
complish as much during the three months 
through each of the three years that he is re- 
quired to serve there, as could possibly be ac- 
complished by attempting to string a military 
training through the entire school course. In 
this way we would get efficiently the required 
result, without entirely perverting our Ameri- 
can ideals and our American traditions, as well 
as perverting if not poisoning our higher ideals 
of education. 

The bill that has recently been passed here 
in our own state, the state of New York, re- 
quiring military training to be introduced into 
our schools and at an earlier age, will, I pre- 
dict, be found so consummately silly that it 
will in due course of time be abrogated. We 
do not always act wisely when any particular 
hysteria is on. Out of such action, however, 
a saner type of action is eventually evolved. 

This method of military training could be 
made one of the greatest agencies imaginable 
in the actualising of an ideal Democracy. 
There all classes, rich and poor, natives and 
foreigners, workers, artisans and college men, 
those from both public and private schools, 



HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 203 

will all meet on a common footing. The an- 
nual conferring of citizenship upon those of 
the third class, those who become twenty-one 
years of age, could be made one of our 
most interesting and stimulating national pub- 
lic days. The swearing of allegiance to the 
nation, the taking on of full citizenship, could 
be made a ceremony on the various great 
plains where the national training camps are 
located equipped and beautified as such 
quite as significant as were those occasions 
when the Greek youths assumed the sense of 
allegiance to their nation so many centuries 
ago. 

If the nation should bear the expenses of 
each during the three annual periods of train- 
ing, which I believe it should, thereby work- 
ing no hardships on any, the cost would be 
but an insignificant amount compared to the 
tremendous cost of a large standing army. 

No amount of military preparation that is 
not combined definitely and completely with 
an enhanced citizenship, and therefore with 
an advance in real democracy, is at all worthy 
of consideration on the part of the American 
people, or indeed on the part of the people of 
any nation. Pre-eminently is this true in this 
day and age. 

Observing this principle we could then, 
while these vast numbers of young men are 



204 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 

being made ready, and to serve our immediate 
needs, have an army of half a million men 
without danger of militarism and without 
heavy financial burdens, and without subvert- 
ing our American ideas providing it is an 
industrial arm. There are great engineering 
projects that could be carried on, thereby de- 
veloping many of our now latent resources; 
there is an immense amount of road-building 
that could be projected in many parts of, if 
not throughout the entire country; there are 
great irrigation projects that could be carried 
on in the far West and Southwest, reclaiming 
millions upon millions of acres of what are 
now unproductive desert lands ; all these could 
be carried on and made even to pay, keeping 
busy a half-million men for half a dozen years 
to come. 

This army of half a million men could be 
recruited, trained to an adequate degree of 
military service, and at the same time could 
be engaged in profitable employment on these 
much-needed works. They could then be paid 
an adequate wage, ample to support a family, 
or ample to lay up savings if without family. 
Such men leaving the army service, would 
then have a degree of training and skill 
whereby they would be able to get positions 
or employment, all more remunerative than 
the bulk of them, perhaps, would ever be 



HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 205 

able to get without such training and ex- 
perience. 

An army of half a million trained men, 
somewhat equally divided between the At- 
lantic and the Pacific seaboards, the bulk of 
them engaged in regular constructive work, 
work that needs to be done and that, therefore, 
could be profitably done, and ready to be called 
into service at a moment's notice, would con- 
stitute a tremendous insurance against any 
aggression from without, and would also give 
a tremendous sense of security for half a dozen 
years at least. This number could then be 
reduced, for by that time several million young 
men from eighteen years up would be partially 
trained and in first-class physical shape to be 
summoned to service should the emergency 
arise. 

In addition to the vast amount of good roads 
building, whose cost could be borne in equal 
proportions by nation, state, and county a 
most important factor in connection with mili- 
tary necessity as well as a great economic 
factor in the successful development and ad- 
vancement of any community the millions of 
acres of now arid lands in the West, awaiting 
only water to make them among the most val- 
uable and productive in all the world, could be 
used as a great solution of our immigration 
problem. 



206 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 

Up to the year when the war began, there 
came to our shores upwards of one million 
immigrants every twelve months, seeking 
work, and most of them homes in this country. 
The great bulk of them got no farther than 
our cities, increasing congestion, already in 
many cases acute, and many of them becoming 
in time, from one cause or another, depend- 
ents, the annual cost of their maintenance 
aggregating many millions every year. 

With these vast acres ready for them large 
numbers could, under a wise system of dis- 
tribution, be sent on to the great West and 
Southwest, and more easily and directly now 
since the Panama Canal is open for navigation. 
Allotments of these lands could be assigned 
them that they could in time become owners 
of, through a wisely established system of pay- 
ments. Many of them would thereby be living 
lives similar to those they lived in their own 
countries, and for which their training and 
experience there have abundantly fitted them. 
They would thus become a far more valuable 
type of citizens landowners than they could 
ever possibly become otherwise, and especially 
through our present unorganised hit-or-miss 
system. They would in time also add annually 
hundreds of millions of productive work to the 
wealth of the country. 

The very wise system that was inaugurated 



HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 207 

some time ago in connection with the Coast 
Defence arm of our army is, under the wise 
direction of our present Secretary of War, to 
be extended to all branches of the service. 
For some time in the Coast Artillery Service 
the enlisted man under competent instruction 
has had the privilege of becoming a skilled 
machinist or a skilled electrician. Now the 
system is to be extended through all branches 
of the military service, and many additional 
trades are to be added to the curricula of the 
trade schools of the army. The young man 
can, therefore, make his own selection and be- 
come a trained artisan at the same time that 
he serves his time in the army, with all ex- 
penses for such training, as well as mainte- 
nance, borne by the Government. He can 
thereby leave the service fully equipped for 
profitable employment. 

This will have the tendency of calling a 
better class of young men into the service; 
it will also do away with the well-founded 
criticism that army life and its idleness, or 
partly-enforced idleness, unfits a man for use- 
ful industrial service after he quits the army. 
If this same system is extended through the 
navy, as it can be, both army and navy serv- 
ice will meet the American requirement that 
neither military nor naval service take great 
numbers of men from productive employment, 



208 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 

to be in turn supported by other workers. In- 
stead of so much dead timber, they are all the 
time producing while in active service, and are 
being trained to be highly efficient as pro- 
ducers, when they leave the service. 

Under this system the Federal Government 
can build its own ordnance works and its own 
munition factories and become its own maker 
of whatever may be required in all lines of 
output. We will then be able to escape the 
perverse influence of gain on the part of large 
munition industries, and the danger that 
comes from that portion of a military party 
whose motives are actuated by personal gain. 

If the occasion arises, or if we permit the 
occasion to arise, Kruppism in America will 
become as dangerous and as sinister in its in- 
fluences and its proportions, as it became in 
Germany. 

The war has also taught us that we must 
be awake to the folly of having the bulk of our 
munition factories and our munition maga- 
zines gathered within the radius of a few miles 
along our Atlantic seaboard. They must be 
wisely distributed over the entire country. 

Another great service that the war has done 
us, is by way of bringing home to us the les- 
son that has been so prominently brought to 
the front in connection with the other 
nations at war, namely, the necessity of the 



HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT aog 

speedy and thorough mobilisation of all lines 
of industries and business ; for the thorough- 
ness and the efficiency with which this can be 
done may mean success that otherwise would 
result in failure and disaster. We are now 
awake to the tremendous importance of this. 

The Committee on Industrial Preparedness 
of the Naval Consulting Board is under the 
chairmanship of one of our ablest engineers, 
who is thoroughly organising the industries 
of the country for readiness and action. 
The responses of practically all our various 
industries to the call that has been sent out as 
to what they are best fitted for, and the ca- 
pacity of their output have been very quick 
and most satisfactory. 

It is at last becoming clearly understood 
among the peoples and the nations of the 
world that, as a nation, we have no desire for 
conquest, for territory, for empire we have 
no purposes of aggression; we have quite 
enough to do to develop our resources and 
our as yet great undeveloped areas. 

A few months before the war broke, I had 
conversations with the heads or with the rep- 
resentatives of leading publishing houses in 
several European countries. It was at a time 
when our Mexican situation was beginning to 
be very acute. I remember at that time espe- 
cially, the conversation with the head of one of 



2io HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 

the largest publishing houses in Italy, in Milan. 
I could see plainly his scepticism when, in 
reply to his questions, I endeavoured to per- 
suade him that as a nation we had no motives 
of conquest or of aggression in Mexico, that 
we were interested solely in the restoration of 
a representative and stable government there. 
And since that time, I am glad to say that our 
acts as a nation have all been along the line 
of persuading him, and also many other like- 
minded ones in many countries abroad, of the 
truth of this assertion. By this general course 
we have been gaining the confidence and have 
been cementing the friendship of practically 
every South American republic, our imme- 
diate neighbours on the southern continent. 
This has been a source of increasing economic 
power with us, and an element of greatly added 
strength, and "also a tremendous energy work- 
ing all the time for the preservation of peace. 

One can say most confidently, even though 
recognising our many grave faults as a nation, 
that our course along this line has been such, 
especially of late years, as to inspire confidence 
on the part of all the fair-minded nations of 
the world. 

Without therefore any designs of aggres- 
sion, any dreams of world empire, knowing 
that we have quite enough to do to attend to 
our own affairs as they are, the immediate 



HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 211 

question is: how shall we be prepared, ade- 
quately prepared for defence, without the enor- 
mous burden, the nuisance, the dangers, and 
the enormous cost of a large standing army? 

Our theory of the state, the theory of de- 
mocracy, is not that the state is above all, 
and that the individual and his welfare are as 
nothing when compared to it, but rather that 
the state is the agency through which the 
highest welfare of all its subjects is to be 
evolved, expressed, maintained. No other 
theory, to my mind, is at all compatible with 
the intelligence of any free-thinking people. 

Otherwise, there is always the danger and 
also the likelihood, while human nature is as 
it is, for some ruler, some clique, or factions so 
to concentrate power into their own hands, 
that for their own ambitions, for aggrandise- 
ment, or for false or short-sighted and half- 
baked ideas of additions to their country, it is 
dragged into periodic wars with other nations. 

Nor do we share in the belief that the state 
is above morality, but rather that identically 
the same moral ideals, precepts and obliga- 
tions that bind individuals must be held sacred 
by the state, otherwise it becomes a pirate 
among nations, and it will inevitably in time be 
hunted down and destroyed as such, however 
great its apparent power. Nor do we as a 
nation share in the belief that war is necessary 



212 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 

and indeed good for a nation, to inspire and 
to preserve its manly qualities, its virility, and 
therefore its power. Were this the only way 
that this could be brought about, it might be 
well and good; but the price to be paid is a 
price that is too enormous and too frightful, 
and the results are too uncertain. We believe 
that these same ideals can be inculcated, that 
these same energies can be used along useful, 
conserving, constructive lines, rather than 
along lines of destruction. 

A nation may have the most colossal and 
perfect military system in the world, and still 
may suffer defeat in any given while, because 
of those unseen things that pertain to the soul 
of another people, whereby powers and forces 
are engendered and materialised that make 
defeat for them impossible; and in the matter 
of big guns, it is well always to remember that 
no nation can build them so great that another 
nation may not build them still greater. 
National safety does not necessarily lie in that 
direction. Nor, on the other hand, along the 
lines of extreme pacificism surely not as long 
as things are as they are. The argument of 
the lamb has small deterrent effect upon the 
wolf as long as the wolf is a wolf. And 
sometimes wolves hunt in packs. The most 
preeminent lesson of the great war for us as 
a nation should be this there should be con- 



HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 213 

stantly a degree of preparedness sufficient to 
hold until all the others, the various portions 
of the nation, thoroughly coordinated and 
ready, can be summoned into action. Thus 
are we prepared, thus are we safe, and there 
is no danger or fear of militarism. 

In a democracy it should, it seems to me, 
be a fundamental fact that hand in hand with 
equal rights there should go a sense of equal 
duty. A call for defence should have a uni- 
versal response. So it is merely good common- 
sense, good judgment, if you please, for all 
the young men of the nation to have a train- 
ing sufficient to enable them to respond ef- 
fectively if the nation's safety calls them to 
its defence. It is no crime, however we may 
deprecate war, to be thus prepared. 

For young men and we must always re- 
member that it is the young men who are 
called for this purpose for young men to be 
called to the colours by the tens or the hun- 
dreds of thousands, unskilled and untrained, 
to be shot down, decimated by the thoroughly 
trained and skilled troops of another nation, 
or a combination of other nations, is indeed the 
crime. Never, moreover, was folly so great as 
that shown by him or by her who will not see. 
And to look at the matter without prejudice, 
we will realise that this is merely policing 
what we have. It is meeting force wjjh 



214 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 

adequate force, if it becomes necessary, so to 
meet it. 

This is necessary until such time as we have 
in operation among nations a machinery 
whereby force will give place to reason, 
whereby common sense will be used in ad- 
justing all differences between nations, as it 
is now used in adjusting differences between 
individuals. 

This is indeed our duty to ourselves and to 
the nation; but it should not blind us to the 
fact that there is immediately before us an- 
other duty to the nation, conjointly with a 
duty to all nations. 



XIII 



OUR SOLE AGENCY OF INTERNATIONAL 

PEACE, AND INTERNATIONAL 

CONCORD 

The consensus of intelligent thought 
throughout the world is to the effect that just 
as we have established an orderly method for 
the settlement of disputes between individuals 
or groups of individuals in any particular 
nation, we must now move forward and 
establish such methods for the settlement of 
disputes among nations. There is no civilised 
country in the world that any longer permits 
the individual to take the law into his own 
hands. 

The intelligent thought of the world now 
demands the definite establishment of a World 
Federation for the enforcement of peace 
among nations. It demands likewise the defi- 
nite establishment of a permanent World 
Court backed by adequate force for the arbitra- 
ment of all disputes among nations unable 
to be adjusted by the nations themselves in 
friendly conference. We have now reached 
the stage in world development and in world 
intercourse where peace must be internation- 
215 



216 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 

alised. Our present chaotic condition, which 
exists simply because we haven't taken time 
as yet to establish a method, must be made to 
give place to an intelligently devised system 
of law and order. Anything short of this 
means a periodic destruction of the finest 
fruits of civilisation. It means also the 
periodic destruction of the finest young man- 
hood of the world. This means, in turn, the 
speedy degeneration of the human race. The 
deification of force, augmented by all the prod- 
ucts and engines of modern science, is simply 
the way of sublimated savagery. 

The world is in need of a new dispensation. 
Recent events show indisputably that we have 
reached the parting of the ways, the family of 
nations must now push on into the new day or 
the world will plunge on into a darker night. 
There is no other course in sight. I know of 
no finer words penned in any language this 
time it was in the French to express an un- 
varying truth than these words by Victor 
Hugo : " There is one thing that is stronger 
than armies, and that is an idea whose time 
has come." 

Never before, after viewing the great havoc 
wrought, the enormous debts that will have 
to be paid for between two and three hundred 
years to come, the tremendous disruptions and 
losses in trade, the misery and degradation 



HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 217 

that stalks broadcast over every land engaged 
in the war scarcely a family untouched 
never before have nations been in the state of 
mind to consider and to long to act upon some 
sensible and comprehensive method of inter- 
national concord and adjustments. If this 
succeeds, the world, including ourselves, is the 
gainer. If this does not succeed, though the 
chances are overwhelmingly in its favour, 
then we can proclaim to the assembled nations 
that as long as a state of outlawry exists among 
nations, that then no longer by chance, but by 
design, we as a nation will be in a state of 
preparedness broad and comprehensive enough 
to defend ourselves against the violation of 
any of the rights of a sovereign nation. It is 
only in this way that we can show a due ap- 
preciation of the struggles and the sacrifices 
of those who gave us our national existence, 
it is only in this way that we can retain our 
self-respect, that we can command the respect 
of other nations ivhile things are as they are; 
that we can hope to retain any degree of in- 
fluence and authority for the diplomatic arm 
of our Government in the Council of Nations. 

Every neutral nation has suffered tremen- 
dously by the war. Every neutral nation will 
suffer until a new world-order among nations 
is projected and perfected. 

We owe a tremendous duty to the world in 



2i8 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 

connection with this great world crisis and up- 
heaval. Diligently should our best men and 
women, those of insight and greatest influence, 
and with the expenditure of both time and 
means, seek to further the practical working 
out of a World Federation and a permanent 
World Court. Public opinion should be thus 
aroused and solidified so that the world knows 
that we stand as a united nation back of the 
idea and the plan when the time comes for 
those in authority formally to present or help 
in presenting such plan before the assembled 
representatives of the nations. Within the 
past twelve months we have heard many clear- 
cut endorsements of such an ideal and such a 
plan from leading statesmen in England, in 
Germany, in France, in Russia, that it would 
seem impossible that with the right proce- 
dure it cannot now be brought into operation. 
The divine right of kings has gone. It holds 
no more. We hear now and then, it is true, 
some silly statement in regard to it, but little 
attention is paid to it. The divine right of 
priests has gone except in the minds of the 
few remaining ignorant and herdable ones. 
The divine right of dynasties or rather of 
dynasties to persist seems to die a little 
harder, but it is on the way. We are now 
realising that the only divine right is the right 
of the people and all the people. 



HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 219 

Never again should it be possible for one 
man, or for one little group of men so to lead, 
or so to mislead a nation as to plunge it into 
war. The growth of democracy compelling 
the greater participation of all the people in 
government must prohibit this. So likewise 
the close relationship of the entire world now 
should make it forever impossible for a single 
nation or group of nations for any cause to 
plunge a whole world or any part of it into 
war. These are sound and clear-visioned 
words recently given utterance to by James 
Bryce : " However much we condemn reckless 
leaders and the ruthless caste that live for 
war, the real source of the mischief is the 
popular sentiment behind them. The lesson 
to be learned is that doctrines and deep-rooted 
passions, whence these evils spring, can only 
be removed by the slow and steady working 
of spiritual forces. What most is needed is 
the elimination of those feelings the teach- 
ings of which breed jealousy and hatred 
and prompt men to defiance and aggres- 
sion." 

Humanity and civilisation is not headed 
towards Ab the cave-man, whatever appear- 
ances, in the minds of many, may indicate at 
the present time. Humanity will arise and 
will reconstruct itself. Great lessons will be 
learned. Good will result. But what a ter- 



220 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 

rific price to pay! What a terrific price to 
pay to learn the lesson that " moral forces are 
the only invincible forces in the universe"! 
It has been slow, but steadily the world is ad- 
vancing to that stage when the individual or 
the nation that does not know that the law 
of mutuality, of cooperation, and still more 
the law of sympathy and good will, is the 
supreme law in real civilisation, real advance- 
ment, and real gain who does not know that 
its own welfare is always bound up with the 
welfare of the greater whole is still in the 
brute stage of life and the bestial propensities 
are still its guiding forces. 

Prejudice, suspicion, hatred, national big- 
headedness, must give way to respect, sym- 
pathy, the desire for mutual understanding 
and cooperation. The higher attributes must 
and will assert themselves. The former are 
the ways of periodic if not continuous de- 
struction the latter are the ways of the 
higher spiritual forces that must prevail. 
Significant are these words of one of our 
younger but clear-visioned American poets, 
Winter Dinner: 

Whether the time be slow or fast, 

Enemies, hand in hand, 
Must come together at the last 

And understand. 



HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 221 

No matter how the die is cast, 
Or who may seem to win 

We know that we must love at last 
Why not begin?' 

The teaching of hatred to children, the 
fostering of hatred in adults, can result only 
in harm to the people and the nation where 
it is fostered. The dragon's tooth will leave 
its marks upon the entire nation and the fair 
life of all the people will suffer by it. The 
holding in contempt of other people makes it 
sometimes necessary that one's own head be 
battered against the wall that he may be suffi- 
ciently aroused to recognise and to appreciate 
their sterling and enduring qualities. 

The use of a club is more spectacular for 
some at least than the use of intellectual and 
moral forces. The rattling of the machine-gun 
produces more commotion than the more 
quiet ways of peace. All of the powerful 
forces in nature, those of growth, germination, 
and conservation, the same as in human life 
are quiet forces. So in the preservation of 
peace. It consists rather in a high construc- 
tive policy. It requires always clear vision, 
a constantly progressive and cooperative 
method of life and action; frank and open 
dealing and a resolute purpose. It is won and 
maintained by nothing so much in the long 



222 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 

run as when it makes the Golden Rule its law 
of conduct. Slowly we are realising that great 
armaments militarism do not insure peace. 
They may lead away from it they are very 
apt to lead away from it. 

Peace is related rather to the great moral 
laws of conduct. It has to do with straight, 
clean, open dealing. It is fostered by sym- 
pathy, forbearance. This does not mean that 
it pertains to weakness. On the contrary it is 
determined by resolute but high purpose, the 
actual and active desire of a nation to live on 
terms of peace with all other nations ; and the 
world's recognition of this fact is a most 
powerful factor in inducing and in actualising 
such living. 

Our own achievement of upwards of a hun- 
dred years in living in peaceable, sympathetic 
and mutually beneficial relations with Canada ; 
Canada's achievement in so living with us, 
should be a distinct and clear-cut answer to 
the argument that nations need to fortify their 
boundaries one against another. This is true 
only where suspicion, mistrust, fear, secret 
diplomacy, and secret alliances hold instead of 
the great and eternally constructive forces 
sympathy, good will, mutual understanding, in- 
duced and conserved by an International Joint 
Commission of able men whose business it is 
to investigate, to determine, and to adjust any 



HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 223 

differences that through the years may arise. 
Here we have a boundary line of upwards of 
three thousand miles and not a fort; vast 
areas of inland seas and not a war vessel ; and 
for upwards of a hundred years not a differ- 
ence that the High Joint Commission has not 
been able to settle amicably and to the mutual 
advantage of both countries. 

I know that in connection with this we have 
an advantage over the old-world nations be- 
cause we are free from age-long prejudices, 
hatreds, and past scores. But if this great 
conflict does not lead along the lines of the 
constructive forces and the working out of a 
new world method, then the future of Europe 
and of the world is dark indeed. Surely it 
will lead to a new order it is almost incon- 
ceivable that it will not. 

The Golden Rule is a wonderful developer 
in human life, a wonderful harmoniser in com- 
munity life with great profit it could be ex- 
tended as the law of conduct in international 
relations. It must be so extended. Its very 
foundation is sympathy, good will, mutuality, 
love. 

The very essence of Jesus' entire revelation 
and teaching was love. It was not the teach- 
ing of weakness or supineness in the face of 
wrong, however. There was no failure on his 
part to smite wrong when he saw it wrong 



224 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 

taking the form of injustice or oppression. 
He had, as we have seen, infinite sympathy for 
and forbearance with the weak, the sinful; 
but he had always a righteous indignation 
and a scathing denunciation for oppression 
for that spirit of hell that prompts men or 
organisations to seek, to study to dominate 
the minds and thereby the lives of others. It 
was, moreover, that he would not keep silent 
regarding the deadly ecclesiasticism that bore 
so heavily upon his people and that had well- 
nigh crushed all their religious life whence 
are the very springs of life, that he aroused 
the deadly antagonism of the ruling hierarchy. 
And as he, witnessing for truth and freedom, 
steadfastly and defiantly opposed oppression, 
so those who catch his spirit today will do 
as he did and will realise as duty " While 
wrong is wrong let no man prate of peace ! " 

Peace? Peace? Peace? 
While wrong is wrong let no man prate of 

peace ! 
He did not prate, the Master. Nay, he smote ! 

Hate wrong! Slay wrong! Else mercy, jus- 
tice, truth, 
Freedom and faith, shall die for humankind.* 

* From that strong, splendid poem, " Buttadeus," 
by William Samuel Johnson. 



HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 225 

Nor did the code and teachings of Jesus 
prevent him driving the money-changers from 
out the temple court. It was not for the pur- 
pose of doing them harm. It was rather to do 
them good by driving home to them in some 
tangible and concrete form, through the skin 
and flesh of their bodies, what the thick skins 
of their moral natures were unable to compre- 
hend. The resistance of wrongdoing is not 
opposed to the law of love. As in community 
life there is the occasional bully who has 
sometimes to be knocked down in order that 
he may have a due appreciation of individual 
rights and community amenities, so among 
nations a similar lesson is sometimes neces- 
sary in order that it or its leaders may learn 
that there are certain things that do not pay, 
and, moreover, will not be allowed by the com- 
munity of nations. 

Making might alone the basis of national 
policy and action, or making it the basis of 
settlement in international settlements, but 
arouses and intensifies hatred and the spirit 
of revenge. So in connection with this great 
world crisis after it all then comes the great 
problem of reorganisation and rehabilitation, 
and unless there comes about an international 
concord strong and definite enough to prevent 
a recurrence of what has been, it would almost 
seem that restoration were futile; for things 



226 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 

will be restored only in time to be destroyed 
again. 

No amount of armament we know now will 
prevent war. It can be prevented only by a 
definite concord of the nations brought finally 
to realise the futility of war. To deny the 
possibility of a World Federation and a World 
Court is to deny the ability of men to govern 
themselves. The history of the American Re- 
public in its demonstration of the power and 
the genius of federation should disprove the 
truth of this. Here we have a nation com- 
posed of forty-eight sovereign states and with 
the most heterogeneous accumulation of peo- 
ple that ever came together in one country, let 
alone one nation, and great numbers of them 
from those nations that for upwards of a thou- 
sand years have been periodically springing 
at one another's throats. Enlightened self- 
government has done it. The real spirit and 
temper of democracy has done it. But it must 
be the preservation of the real spirit of de- 
mocracy and constant vigilance that must 
preserve it. 

Our period of isolation is over. We have 
become a world-nation. Equality of rights 
presupposes equality of duty. In our very 
souls we loathe militarism. Conquest and 
aggression are foreign to our spirit, and for- 
eign to our thoughts and ambitions. But 



HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 227 

weakness will by no means assure us immunity 
from aggression from without. Universal 
military trainmg up to a reasonable point, and 
the joint sense of responsibility of every man 
and every woman in the nation, and the right 
of the national government to expect and to 
demand that every man and woman stand 
ready to respond to the call to service, 
whatever form it may take this is our 
armour. 

All intelligent people know that the national 
government has always had the power to draft 
every male citizen fit for service into military 
service. It is not therefore a question of uni- 
versal military service. The real and only 
question is whether these or great numbers of 
these go out illy prepared and equipped as 
sheep to the shambles perchance, or whether 
they go out trained and equipped to do a man's 
work more adequately prepared to protect 
themselves as well as the integrity of the 
nation. It is not to be done for the love or 
the purpose of militarism ; but recognising the 
fact that militarism still persists, that with us 
it may not be triumphant should we at any 
time be forced to face it. There are certain 
facts that only to our peril as well as our 
moral degradation, we can be blind to. Said 
a noted historian but a few days ago: 



228 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 

" I loathe war and militarism. I have fought 
them for twenty years. But I am a historian, 
and I know that bullies thrive best in an at- 
mosphere of meekness. As long as this mili- 
tary system lasts you must discourage the 
mailed fist by showing that you will meet it 
with something harder than a boxing glove. 
We do not think it good to admit into the code 
of the twentieth century that a great national 
bully may still with impunity squeeze the 
blood out of its small neighbours and seize 
their goods." 

We need not fear militarism arising in 
America as long as the fundamental principles 
of democracy are preserved and continually 
extended, which can be done only through the 
feeling of the individual responsibility of every 
man and every woman to take a keen and con- 
stant interest in the matters of their own gov- 
ernment community, state, national, and now 
international. We must realise and ever more 
fully realise that in a government such as ours, 
the people are the government, and that when 
in it anything goes wrong, or wrongs and in- 
justices are allowed to grow and hold sway, 
we are to blame. 

Universal military training has not mili- 
tarised Switzerland nor has it Australia. It 
is rather the very essence of democracy and 
the very antithesis of militarism. 



HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT MQ 

" Let each son of Freedom bear 
His portion of the burden. Should not each 

one do his share? 
To sacrifice the splendid few 
The strong of heart, the brave, the true, 
Who live or die as heroes do, 
While cowards profit is not fair ! " 

Many still recall that not a few well-mean- 
ing people at the close of the Civil War pro- 
claimed that, with upwards of two million 
trained men behind him, General Grant would 
become a military dictator, and that this would 
be followed by the disappearance of democ- 
racy in the nation. But the mind, the temper, 
the traditions of our people are all a guaran- 
tee against militarism. The gospel, the hal- 
lucination of the shining armour, the will to 
power, has no attraction for us. We loathe 
it; nor do we fear its undermining and crush- 
ing our own liberties internally. Nevertheless, 
it is true that vigilance is always and always 
will be the price of liberty. There must be a 
constant education towards citizenship. There 
must be an alert democracy, so that any land 
and sea force is always the servant of the 
spirit; for only otherwise it can become its 
master but otherwise it will become its 
master. 

Prejudice, suspicion, hatred on the part of 



230 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 

individuals or on the part of the people of one 
nation against the people of another nation, 
have never yet advanced the welfare of any 
individual or any nation and never can. The 
world war is but the direct result of the type 
of peace that preceded it. The militarist argu- 
ment reduced to its lowest terms amounts 
merely to this : " For two nations to keep 
peace each must be stronger than the other." 
The real hope of preserving amicable relations, 
and, therefore, of maintaining a permanent 
peace, lies not in this direction; nor in the 
direction of making war physically impossible ; 
but rather in making it spiritually impossible. 
The open expression and the systematised 
efforts of public opinion is the only thing that 
will effectually hasten the moment when a 
decisive move is made for culminating the 
new order of world relations, including the 
orderly procedure in the examination and the 
settling of international disputes or differ- 
ences. 

Representative men of other countries do 
not resent our part in pressing this matter and 
in taking the leadership in it. But even if they 
did they would have no just right to. There 
is, however, a very general feeling that the 
American Republic, as the world's greatest 
example of successful federation, should take 
the lead in the World Federation, and espe- 



HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 231 

cially at this time when their own hands are 
so full and are virtually tied. The following 
words by James Bryce, spoken some time ago, 
are but representative of a very general con- 
sensus of opinion abroad in this regard: 

" The creation of some international alliance 
embracing all peace-loving nations could 
hardly succeed without the cooperation of the 
greatest of all neutral nations. With that co- 
operation, difficult as the effort to construct 
such a scheme will be, there is at least a real 
hope of success. Largely in vain will this war 
have been fought and all these sufferings en- 
dured if the peoples of the world are to fall 
back into a state of permanent alarm, sus- 
picion; and the hospitality of each would be 
weighed down by the frightful burden of ar- 
maments. Let us hope that the proffered help 
of America will encourage the statesmen of 
Europe and draw from them a responsive 
note." And again : " The obstacles in the way 
of creating such a league are many and 
obvious, but whatever else may come out of 
the war, we in England hope that one result 
of it will be the creation of some machinery 
calculated to avert the recurrence of so awful 
a calamity as that from which mankind is now 
suffering." 



232 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 

And a few days later, speaking of a World 
League to secure future peace, the Secretary 
of Foreign Affairs of one of the great nations 
at war said: 

" I believe the best work neutrals can do 
for the moment is to try to prevent a war like 
this from happening again. It is a work of 
neutral countries to which we should all look 
with favour and hope. Only, we* must bear 
this in mind: if the nations after the war are 
able to do something effective by binding 
themselves with the common object of pre- 
serving peace, they must be prepared to under- 
take no more than they are able to uphold by 
force, and to see, when the time of crisis 
comes, that it is upheld by force. The ques- 
tion we must ask them is : ' Will you play up 
when the time comes?' It is not merely the 
sign-manual of Presidents and sovereigns that 
is really to make that worth while; it must 
also have behind it Parliaments and national 
sentiments." 

A well-known German authority on Inter- 
national Law and representative also of the 
German government at The Hague Conference, 
Professor Philip Zorn, in a notable article in 
" Der Tag " some time ago, spoke of his readi- 
ness to accept an ending of the war by an 



HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 233 

international conference and settlement that 
would insure the prevention of future wars, 
and added : " The problem of resolving all 
quarrels through the arbitration method 
offers, it is true, great difficulties, but not in- 
surmountable ones." 

This is now going to be greatly fostered by 
virtue of one great good that the world war 
will eventually have accomplished the doom 
and the end of autocracy. Dynasties and privi- 
leged orders that have lived and lived alone on 
militarism, will have been foreclosed on. The 
people in control, in an increasingly intelligent 
control of their own lives and their own gov- 
ernments, will be governed by a higher degree 
of self-enlightenment and mutual self-interest 
than under the domination or even the leader- 
ship of any type of hereditary ruling class or 
war-lord. In some countries autocracy in re- 
ligion, through the free mingling and discus- 
sions of men of various nationalities and re- 
ligious persuasions, will be again lessened, 
whereby the direct love and power of God in 
the hearts of men, as Jesus taught, will have 
a fuller sway and a more holy and a diviner 
moulding power in their lives. 

It was during those long, weary years 
coupled with the horrible crimes of the Thirty 
Years' War that the science of International 
Law began to take form, the result of that 



234 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 

notable work, " De Jure Belli ac Pads," by 
Grotius. It is ours to see that out of this 
more intense and thereby even more horrible 
conflict a new epoch in human and inter- 
national relations be born. 

As the higher powers of mind and spirit are 
realised and used, great primal instincts im- 
pelling men to expression and action that find 
their outlet many times in war, will be trans- 
muted and turned from destruction into power- 
ful engines of construction. When a moral 
equivalent for war of sufficient impelling 
power is placed before men, those same virile 
qualities and powers that are now marshalled 
so easily for purposes of fighting, will, under 
the guidance and in the service of the spirit, 
be used for the conserving of human life, and 
for the advancement and the increase of every- 
thing that administers to life, that makes it 
more abundant, more mutual, and more happy. 
And God knows that the call for such service 
is very great. 

Our time needs again more the prophet and 
less the priest. It needs the God-impelled life 
and voice of the prophet with his face to the 
future, both God-ward and man-ward, burn- 
ing with an undivided devotion to truth and 
righteousness. It needs less the priest, too 
often with his back to the future and too often 
the pliant tool of the organisation whose 



HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 235 

chief concern is, and ever has been, the preser- 
vation of itself under the ostensible purpose 
of the preservation of the truth once delivered, 
the same that Jesus with his keen powers of 
penetration saw killed the Spirit as a high 
moral guide and as an inspirer to high and 
unself-centred endeavour, and that he char- 
acterised with such scathing scorn. There are 
splendid exceptions; but this is the rule now 
even as it was in his day. 

The prophet is concerned with truth, not 
a system; with righteousness, not custom; 
with justice, not expediency. Is there a man 
who would dare say that if Christianity the 
Christianity of the Christ had been actually 
in vogue, in practice in all the countries of 
Christendom during the last fifty years, dur- 
ing the last twenty-five years, that this colos- 
sal and gruesome war would ever have come 
about? No clear-thinking and honest man 
would or could say that it would. We need 
again the voice of the prophet, clear-seeing, 
high-purposed, and unafraid. We need again 
the touch of the prophet's hand to lead us 
back to those simple fundamental teachings 
of the Christ of Nazareth, that are life-giving 
to the individual, and that are world-saving. 

We speak of our Christian civilisation, and 
the common man, especially in times like 
these, asks what it is, where it is and God 



236 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 

knows that we have been for many hundred 
years wandering in the wilderness. He is 
thinking that that Kingdom of God on earth 
that the true teachings of Jesus predicated, and 
that he laboured so hard to actualise, needs 
some speeding up. There is a world-wide 
yearning for spiritual peace and righteousness 
on the part of the common man. He is finding 
it occasionally in established religion, but 
often, perhaps more often, independently of 
it. He is finding it more often through his 
own contact and relations with the Man of 
Nazareth for him the God-man. There is no 
greater fact in our time, and there is no greater 
hope for the future than is to be found in this 
fact. 

We need a stock-taking and a mobilisation 
of our spiritual forces. But what, after all, 
does this mean? Search as we may we are 
brought back every time to this same Man of 
Nazareth, the God-man Son of Man and Son 
of God. And gathering it into a few brief sen- 
tences it is this: Jesus' great revelation was 
this consciousness of God in the individual 
life, and to this he witnessed in a supreme and 
masterly way, because this he supremely real- 
ised and lived. Faith in him and following 
him does not mean acquiring some particular 
notion of God or some particular belief about 
him himself. It is the living in one's own life 



HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 237 

of this same consciousness of God as one's 
source and Father, and a living in these same 
filial relations with him of love and guidance 
and care that Jesus entered into and con- 
tinuously lived. 

When this is done there is no problem and 
no condition in the individual life that it will 
not clarify, mould, and therefore take care of; 
for "fjirj fj.spifj.vaTe rrj fyvx?f v).icav " do not 
worry about your life was the Master's clear- 
cut command. Are we ready for this high 
type of spiritual adventure? Not only are we 
assured of this great and mighty truth that 
the Master revealed and going ahead of us 
lived, that under this supreme guidance we 
need not worry about the things of the life, 
but that under this Divine guidance we need 
not think even of the life itself, if for any 
reason it becomes our duty or our privi- 
lege to lay it down. Witnessing for truth and 
standing for truth he again.preceded us in this. 

But this, this love for God or rather this 
state that becomes the natural and the normal 
life when we seek the Kingdom, and the Divine 
rule becomes dominant and operative in mind 
and heart, leads us directly back to his other 
fundamental: Thou shalt love thy neighbour 
as thyself. For if God is my Father and if he 
cares for me in this way and every other man 
in the world is my brother and He cares for 



238 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 

him in exactly the same way then by the 
sanction of God his Father I haven't anything 
on my brother; and by the love of God my 
Father my brother hasn't anything on me. It 
is but the most rudimentary commonsense 
then, that we be considerate one of another, 
that we be square and decent one with an- 
other. We will do well as children of the 
same Father to sit down and talk matters over ; 
and arise with the conclusion that the advice 
of Jesus, our elder brother, is sound : " There- 
fore all things whatsoever ye would that men 
should do to you, do ye even so to them." 

He gave it no label, but it has subsequently 
become known as the Golden Rule. There is 
no higher rule and no greater developer of the 
highest there is in the individual human life, 
and no greater adjuster and beautifier of the 
problems of our common human life. And 
when it becomes sufficiently strong in its ac- 
tion in this, the world awaits its projection 
into its international life. This is the truth 
that he revealed the twofold truth of love to 
God and love for the neighbour, that shall make 
men free. The truth of the Man of Nazareth 
still holds and shall hold, and we must realise 
this adequately before we ask or can expect 
any other revelation. 

We are in a time of great changes. The 
discovery of new laws and therefore of new 



HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 239 

truth necessitates changes and necessitates 
advances. But whatever changes or advances 
may come, the Divine reality still survives, in- 
dependent of Jesus it is true, but as the world 
knows him still better, it will give to him its 
supreme gratitude and praise, in that he was 
the most perfect revealer of God to man, of 
God in man, and the most concrete in that he 
embodied and lived this truth in his own 
matchless human-divine life ; and stands as the 
God-man to which the world is gradually ap- 
proaching. For as Goethe has said " We can 
never get beyond the spirit of Jesus." 

Do you know that incident in connection 
with the little Scottish girl? She was trudg- 
ing along, carrying as best she could a boy 
younger, but it seemed almost as big as she 
herself, when one remarked to her how heavy 
he must be for her to carry, when instantly 
came the reply : " He's na heavy. He's mi 
brither." Simple is the incident; but there is 
in it a truth so fundamental that pondering 
upon it, it is enough to make many a man, to 
whom dogma or creed make no appeal, a 
Christian and a mighty engine for good in 
the world. And more there is in it a truth 
so fundamental and so fraught with potency 
and with power, that its wider recognition and 
projection into all human relations would re- 
construct a world. 



/ sa<a) the mountains stand 
Silent, 'wonderful, and grand, 
Looking out across the land 
When the golden light was falling 
On distant dome and spire ; 
And I heard a low voice calling, 
" Come up higher, come up higher. 
From the lowland and the mire, 
From the mist of earth desire, 
From the vain pussvit of pelf, 
From the attitude of self: 
Come up higher, c^me up higher. ' 
James G. Clarke 



341 



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